The analysis, published before peer review on the Open Science Framework on September 24, 2024, found one in seven scientific papers may be at least partly fake. The author, James Heathers, a long-standing scientific sleuth, arrived at that figure by averaging data from 12 existing studies – collectively containing a sample of around 75,000 studies – that estimate the volume of problematic scientific output.
Heathers’ study pulls data from 12 different analyses from the social sciences, medicine, biology, and other fields of research. All those studies have one thing in common: The authors of each used various online tools to estimate the amount of fakery taking place in a set of papers.
"I don’t think it’s entirely wrong but I think that it can be slightly misleading," said Gowri Gopalakrishna, an epidemiologist at the Maastricht University in the Netherlands who co-authored a 2021 study that found 8% of researchers in a survey of nearly 7,000 scientists in the Netherlands confessed to falsifying or fabricating data at least once between 2017 and 2020.
More: https://osf.io/5rf2m/
