1) The paper defines "fake" in this first sentence:
> ‘Fake’ science is either intentionally fabricated-where quantitative elements are invented-or intentionally falsified-where results are dishonestly engineered from real data.
2) The title "How much science is fake?" is clickbaity. The actual assertion of the paper:
> a preliminary approximation is that 1 in 7 published papers have serious errors commensurate with being untrustworthy.
3) The paper is a meta-analysis of 12 other forensic metascience papers. The approximation of 1 in 7 (14%) is an average of estimates derived from those other papers.
4) It's important to note that publishing papers is just one small subset of the massive endeavor that we call science. Moreover, as far as I'm aware, "publish or perish" appears to be a relatively recent historical phenomena of professional academia. We could probably do without many published papers, which exist merely to advance the careers of the authors.
5) In any human endeavor that involves money and/or power—which is almost everything—there will be corruption. It's unavoidable, given human nature. Thus, there's nothing uniquely untrustworthy about science. And science was never intended to be a religion: self-criticism is supposed to be a feature, not a bug, so my personal view is that the open study of fake papers is a sign of health rather than a sign of disease.
6) Is 1 in 7 really that bad? The converse is that 86% of published papers do not have serious errors commensurate with being untrustworthy.
Ironically if this paper intentionally uses an incorrect and misleading term "fake", to label and then claim that 1 in 7 are fake, would it make the paper itself "fake" according to their standards?
Because they find 1 in 7 with serious errors, but their definition of "fake" requires it to be intentional. Where's the evidence it's intentional for all of these 1 in 7?
It says "serious errors commensurate with being untrustworthy", which I think is meant to be an alternative way to say commensurate with being fake.
Arguments about intentionality are a bit of a distraction. Academics routinely try and excuse obvious fakery by claiming to be incredibly incompetent. At some point you have to treat unlimited incompetence as harshly as deliberate deception.
> ‘Fake’ science is either intentionally fabricated-where quantitative elements are invented-or intentionally falsified-where results are dishonestly engineered from real data.
2) The title "How much science is fake?" is clickbaity. The actual assertion of the paper:
> a preliminary approximation is that 1 in 7 published papers have serious errors commensurate with being untrustworthy.
3) The paper is a meta-analysis of 12 other forensic metascience papers. The approximation of 1 in 7 (14%) is an average of estimates derived from those other papers.
4) It's important to note that publishing papers is just one small subset of the massive endeavor that we call science. Moreover, as far as I'm aware, "publish or perish" appears to be a relatively recent historical phenomena of professional academia. We could probably do without many published papers, which exist merely to advance the careers of the authors.
5) In any human endeavor that involves money and/or power—which is almost everything—there will be corruption. It's unavoidable, given human nature. Thus, there's nothing uniquely untrustworthy about science. And science was never intended to be a religion: self-criticism is supposed to be a feature, not a bug, so my personal view is that the open study of fake papers is a sign of health rather than a sign of disease.
6) Is 1 in 7 really that bad? The converse is that 86% of published papers do not have serious errors commensurate with being untrustworthy.