Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped?

Probably not — the incentives are too strong. But a few reformers are trying to change things.

Last week’s episode, the first of a two-part series we first published a year ago, was called “Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia?” It was ... a little gossipy, for us at least. In the second part, which we're republishing today, we’re back to wonky — taking a look at the academic-research industry. And believe me, it is an industry, and one that's rife with misconduct, from the universities to the academic journals to the cheaters themselves.

Fortunately, some people are trying to push back. We spoke with several of them for this episode, including Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia, who heads the Center for Open Science; and Leif Nelson, a professor at U.C. Berkeley who contributes to the blog Data Colada, which has exposed what looks like fraud on the part of some prominent researchers. In October, Nosek and Nelson were themselves called out when a paper that they published (about why researchers should preregister their hypotheses) had to be retracted. It turned out that Nosek and Nelson and their coauthors hadn't properly preregistered their hypotheses.

For this update, we talked to Nosek about the incident:

I am just as vulnerable to error as anybody else. One of the real lessons, I think, is that without transparency, these errors will go unexposed. It would have been very hard for the critics to identify that we had screwed this up without being able to access the portions of the materials that we were able to make public.

I hope you enjoy our update to this story, and that you're having a happy new year. We’ll be back with a brand new episode of Freakonomics Radio next week.

You can hear this week’s episode of Freakonomics Radio, “Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update),” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. A full transcript is available on our website.

By the way, we’re making a change to our publication schedule. Starting next week, new episodes of Freakonomics Radio will come out on Friday mornings (rather than Wednesday evenings) — which means this newsletter will also come out Friday mornings. See you next Friday!

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Also on the Freakonomics Radio Network this week

The Economics of Everyday Things: Pistachios

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Apple Podcasts | Spotify | transcript