Bad Science and its Nuances

Armen Berenson

Professor Horgan

HST-401 Science Writing

24 January 2023

Bad Science and its Nuances


Bad apples in the workplace: the uninterested and pill-pushing physician, the construction worker who cuts corners towards the end of the day, and the chef who serves frozen lobster but prices them like they’re fresh. Hey, these aren’t crimes punishable by death or imprisonment, but they are reckless and sometimes unethical ways to conduct one’s career, and it seems fair to assume that everyone is prone to cutting corners at some point in their life. A prime example of this disheartening facet of the human condition lies within the ever-broadening body of scientific work humanity continues to amass. Yes, even the seemingly cold, cut, and dry pursuit of scientific discovery can be, and often is, manipulated by an insincere or simply unaware researcher, and it might be killing science’s credibility altogether.


This practice probably isn't always as sinister as I’m making it sound. I have no doubt that some researchers really have sold out and have little issue bending their data to create favorable conclusions, perhaps for greater acclaim or to fabricate conclusions on behalf of some special interest group who'll line their pockets in exchange for favorable findings; but it's more likely that incorrect findings continue to surface in the scientific world simply because, well, good science is hard to do. Part of the reason why this is the case is that results are not the same thing as answers. Scientific inquiry returns results like a CVS cashier returns receipts: at great length. Data is easy to get when you’ve got time and money. Simply assemble a control and experimental group, structure a double-blind study, identify biases and eliminate extraneous variables if you can, and test away. Test sufficiently and you’ll have plenty of results on your hands, but interpreting that data is a whole new fish to fry, and this is where the lines between art and science begin to blur. Fivethirtyeight.com published an article by Christie Aschwanden which does an excellent job of depicting this difficulty by way of an interactable graphic in which you define the terms of a simulated political-economic study (Aschwanden), and witness how including or excluding certain categories of possibly relevant data can easily influence whether a dataset indicates one answer, the opposite answer, or whether the data is even statistically significant at all. From this perspective, science is anything but cold, cut, and dry.


Alas, regardless of whether a scientific article is sound in its findings or not, some researchers feel that it's okay to synthesize their own peer reviews. By falsely stamping their own works with the approval of real or made-up scientists, these cheaters make it even more difficult to distinguish real findings from fiction! One instance of this is depicted in an article on nature.com by Cat Ferguson et al, where an author named Hyung-In Moon working in South Korea was found to be reviewing his own articles. The comments he made on his work were mostly favorable, with slight criticism to assumingly create the illusion of validity. Unfortunately for Moon he was far from elusive and was ultimately flagged and confronted for having numerous reviews made on his research in a mere 24-hour period. That was goodnight for Moon as he immediately confessed to falsifying his peer reviews, “leading to the withdrawal of 28 papers by several Informa journals, and the resignation of an editor,” (Ferguson). At least he knew when to throw in the towel, I guess.


This pitiful practice is not so uncommon. SAGE, a company based in Thousand Oaks, California, publisher of the Journal of Vibration and Control, launched a 14-month investigation into fraudulent reviewers that came to involve about 20 people from SAGE’s editorial, legal, and production departments. The investigation discovered that a series of Gmail addresses, “each linked to accounts… used by SAGE and several other publishers, including Informa,” (Ferguson), led to over 130 suspicious accounts responsible for phony peer reviews. It’s sad to see such a gross slandering of scientific study, a pursuit responsible for the enlightenment and enrichment of the lives of so many, get dragged down by a few honorless individuals; but with upstanding leaders willing to investigate such misconduct, such as those at the head Informa and SAGE, I remain optimistic about the validity and honor of the scientific community moving forward.


Works Cited:

Aschwanden, C. Science Isn’t Broken. FiveThirtyEight (2015). https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/#part1, 19 August 2015, Accessed 24 January 2023.


Ferguson, C., Marcus, A. & Oransky, I. Publishing: The peer-review scam. Nature 515, 480–482 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/515480a, 26 November 2014, Accessed 24 January 2023.


“ChatGPT.” OpenAI (2022), https://chat.openai.com/chat. [ChatGPT was used to spark inspiration for a title for this article. No responses were taken word for word from the program.]
Location: Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA

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