Fundamentally scientific rigor and accuracy is often misaligned with larger societal norms and values - a pharmaceutical corporation with a profit-making pill doesn't want to hear about the 1% of users who suffer catastrophic medical conditions as a result of using their product (e.g. Vioxx with 88,000 heart attacks and 38,000 deaths out of 107,000,000 prescriptions from 1999-2004). Similarly the Soviet Union's Lysenko tailored his research results to align with Stalinist ideology on adaptability, thereby securing his position in the academic structure - behavior that was remarkably similar to that of Anthony Fauci regarding the origins of Sars-CoV2 and the efficacy of the various treatments and vaccines that were so highly profitable to the corporate pharmaceutical sector. Reckless virology research that he supported caused a global pandemic that cost at least $10 trillion in economic damage and took millions of lives - but admitting that opens the door to liability, so no.
I've worked with both ends of the spectrum - fraudulent tenured PIs at leading research universities are not that rare, but highly skilled and reliable PIs are more common. The fundamental difference always seems to be record-keeping - frauds aren't interested in keeping detailed records of their activities that can be used by others to replicate their work (since their work is non-replicable). In contrast, the reputable researcher will want such detailed records for various reasons, including defense against false claims of fraud or incompetence, which is quite common if the research results are not aligned with corporate profit motives in areas like pharmaceuticals, fossil fuels and climate, environmental pollutants, etc.
If the powers that be really wanted to reduce research fraud, the easiest way is to make detailed record-keeping a requirement of federally-funded research, with regular audits of lab notebooks and comparisons to published work. This matters, because the problem is set to get worse with the spread of AI tools that make it possible to generate hard-to-detect fake datasets and images. In the past a great many frauds were caught because their fake data generation was so obvious, often just a copy and paste effort.
I've worked with both ends of the spectrum - fraudulent tenured PIs at leading research universities are not that rare, but highly skilled and reliable PIs are more common. The fundamental difference always seems to be record-keeping - frauds aren't interested in keeping detailed records of their activities that can be used by others to replicate their work (since their work is non-replicable). In contrast, the reputable researcher will want such detailed records for various reasons, including defense against false claims of fraud or incompetence, which is quite common if the research results are not aligned with corporate profit motives in areas like pharmaceuticals, fossil fuels and climate, environmental pollutants, etc.
If the powers that be really wanted to reduce research fraud, the easiest way is to make detailed record-keeping a requirement of federally-funded research, with regular audits of lab notebooks and comparisons to published work. This matters, because the problem is set to get worse with the spread of AI tools that make it possible to generate hard-to-detect fake datasets and images. In the past a great many frauds were caught because their fake data generation was so obvious, often just a copy and paste effort.