Unfortunately there's a lot of evidence that fraud really is very prevalent and we don't hear about it anywhere near enough. It depends a lot on the field though.
One piece of evidence comes from software like GRIM and SPRITE. GRIM was run over psychology papers and found around 50% had impossible means in them (that could not be arrived at by any combination of allowed inputs) [1]. The authors generally did not cooperate to help uncover the sources of the problems.
Yet another comes from estimates by editors of well known journals. For example Richard Horton at the Lancet is no stranger to fraud, having published and promoted the Surgisphere paper. He estimates that maybe 50% of medical papers are making untrue claims, which is interesting in that this intuition matches the number obtained in a different field by a more rigorous method. The former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine stated that it was "no longer possible to believe much of the medical research that is published".
50%+ is a number that crops up frequently in medicine. The famous Ioannidis paper, "Why most published research findings are false" (2005) has been cited over 12,000 times.
Marc Andreessen has said in an interview that he talked to the head of a very large government grant agency, and asked him whether it could really be true that half of all biomedical research claims were fake? The guy laughed and said no it's not true, it's more like 90%. [2]
Elizabeth Bik uncovers a lot of fraud. Her work is behind the recent resignation of the head of Stanford University for example. Years ago she said, "Science has a huge problem: 100s (1000s?) of science papers with obvious photoshops that have been reported, but that are all swept under the proverbial rug, with no action or only an author-friendly correction … There are dozens of examples where journals rather accept a clean (better photoshopped?) figure redo than asking the authors for a thorough explanation." In reality there seem to be far more than mere thousands, as there are companies that specialize in professionally producing fake scientific papers, and whole markets where they are bought and sold.
So you have people who are running the scientific system saying, on the record, that they think science is overrun with fake results. And there is some quantitive data to support this. And it seems to happen quite often now that presidents of entire universities are being caught having engaged in or having signed off on rule breaking behavior, like image manipulation or plagiarism, implying that this behavior is at least rewarded or possibly just very common.
There are also whole fields in which the underlying premises are known to be false so arguably that's also pretty deceptive (e.g. "bot studies"). If you include those then it's quite likely indeed that most published research is simply untrue.
One piece of evidence comes from software like GRIM and SPRITE. GRIM was run over psychology papers and found around 50% had impossible means in them (that could not be arrived at by any combination of allowed inputs) [1]. The authors generally did not cooperate to help uncover the sources of the problems.
Yet another comes from estimates by editors of well known journals. For example Richard Horton at the Lancet is no stranger to fraud, having published and promoted the Surgisphere paper. He estimates that maybe 50% of medical papers are making untrue claims, which is interesting in that this intuition matches the number obtained in a different field by a more rigorous method. The former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine stated that it was "no longer possible to believe much of the medical research that is published".
50%+ is a number that crops up frequently in medicine. The famous Ioannidis paper, "Why most published research findings are false" (2005) has been cited over 12,000 times.
Marc Andreessen has said in an interview that he talked to the head of a very large government grant agency, and asked him whether it could really be true that half of all biomedical research claims were fake? The guy laughed and said no it's not true, it's more like 90%. [2]
Elizabeth Bik uncovers a lot of fraud. Her work is behind the recent resignation of the head of Stanford University for example. Years ago she said, "Science has a huge problem: 100s (1000s?) of science papers with obvious photoshops that have been reported, but that are all swept under the proverbial rug, with no action or only an author-friendly correction … There are dozens of examples where journals rather accept a clean (better photoshopped?) figure redo than asking the authors for a thorough explanation." In reality there seem to be far more than mere thousands, as there are companies that specialize in professionally producing fake scientific papers, and whole markets where they are bought and sold.
So you have people who are running the scientific system saying, on the record, that they think science is overrun with fake results. And there is some quantitive data to support this. And it seems to happen quite often now that presidents of entire universities are being caught having engaged in or having signed off on rule breaking behavior, like image manipulation or plagiarism, implying that this behavior is at least rewarded or possibly just very common.
There are also whole fields in which the underlying premises are known to be false so arguably that's also pretty deceptive (e.g. "bot studies"). If you include those then it's quite likely indeed that most published research is simply untrue.
[1] https://peerj.com/preprints/2064v1/
[2] https://www.richardhanania.com/p/flying-x-wings-into-the-dea...