Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Questionable research practices from the practitioners’ perspectives

With Monica Gonzales-Marquez, Priya Silverstein and Eike Mark Rinke.

In preparation for Metascience 2025, I put together a panel with three other researchers called “Questionable Research Practices from the Perspective of the Researcher: Understanding Perverse Incentives using Autoethnography”. We used our own discussions in online meetings and individually as recorded narratives as content for this panel. The impetus was that much metascience points accusatory fingers at problems in science, thus supporting a culture of fear. Researchers comply to avoid scrutiny, and not necessarily out of an intrinsic motivation to do good science.

When successful and meaningful science is measured entirely by publication in a ‘high impact’ journal and high citation counts, the drive to do science is transmuted into a laser-like focus on publishing. The intrinsic motivation to contribute to the creation of scientific knowledge becomes confounded with publishing, while simultaneously deprioritising the robust, pedantic, methodical, humble labor involved in doing good research. The scientific method gets confounded with the mechanics of publishing and achieving “standing” in the scientific community.

We hope that by revealing our own experiences in the world of ‘publish-or-perish’, and how it has pushed us towards questionable research practices (QRPs), we might generate intrinsic motivation in others to dispassionately examine their own scientific practices.. By looking back through our histories in academic work and sharing them, we also expect to increase our own intrinsic motivations to be ever vigilant, and to learn to always privilege scientific integrity over publishing.

Confounding: Publication = Science

A major theme in our narratives is that science has been fully confounded with publishing. For some of us, the pressure to publish, and the toxic atmosphere and interactions pushed us out of academia entirely. For others, we internalized the publishing norm, convincing ourselves that we were doing impactful science, when we were actually just doing impactful publishing – which does almost nothing to alter collective human knowledge, promote social justice or solve other societal problems.

Some excerpts from our narratives:

Questionable Behaviors: Hacking

The pragmatics of doing science in a publish or perish culture is that we either engage in some (often undeliberate) hacking and storytelling, or are sanctioned.

Some excerpts:

Ego, Power and Personal Struggles

As human beings we are prone to seeking status, material security, community acknowledgement and different things depending on where we are at in life, and who we are personality-wise. Especially when in graduate school, we are in a position of little power in comparison to professors and our supervisors. People who  wield power over others, and push their own ego-centric agendas tend to be quite successful in science. This can lead to abuses of power, ego trips and other toxic behaviors that can diminish junior researchers’ ability to push back against pressures to engage in QRPs and have strongly demotivating effects.

Intrinsic Motivation

We hope that by speaking out, and normalizing scrutiny of our own experiences of questionable research practices as something valuable, we can help others become intrinsically motivated to do the same. Moreover, we propose that ethnographic narrative may be an underexplored but powerful method to help uncover the causes and motivations of questionable research practices from researchers’ lived experience of “doing science”.

Part of the motivation for this panel is based on one of the authors’ (Nate Breznau’s) own authoethnographic research into my QRPs. He presented preliminary results at the Sociological Science Conference at Cornell (link to slides).

Readers can find the full poster for our presentation at Metascience 2025 at University College London here.

Our future plans are to seek a larger sample of researchers and invite them to a semi-structured narrative sharing process (via recording themselves) to further study QRPs. In particular we hope to target early career researchers to shed light on the current state of science training and supervision experiences. 

Science in survival mode

Scientific research is unreliable. It comes with uncertainty. Whether launching a rocket or measuring racial prejudice, there is uncertainty. We use this uncertainty to make decisions. If the rocket has a 40% chance of exploding, best not to stick astronauts in it. If skin-tone bias of soccer referees is somewhere from none to a lot, it is irresponsible to conclude they are prejudiced.

Investigating uncertainty, is science. Truth and uncertainty are two sides of the same coin, they co-define each other. A problem for humans measuring uncertainty, is that humans are unreliable. Human scientists themselves add uncertainty to the measurement of uncertainty.

Recent studies suggest that somewhere between 25 and 60% of published statistical results cannot be recreated using the materials provided – these measures of uncertainty come with their own uncertainty. It turns out that scientific researchers are doing some really peculiar things to generate uncertainty. Some surveys suggest as many as 9% of scientists faked data at least once in their careers, and that more than half selectively reported findings – a behavior that makes the things they study to appear less uncertain than they actually are.

I believe the answer lies in their humanness. Like all animals, they are genetically programmed for survival. They are capable of both rational, reflective decision-making and split second reaction without any thought. Given time to reflect, a human would generally conclude murder is unethical, but simultaneously would not hesitate to kill if it prevented their child from being killed. Murder remains wrong, but to not kill and let a child die is also wrong. It would be irresponsible parenting failing to ensure survival.

Murder is a profound act when a human perceives themselves to be in a situation of life or death. It is a symptom of subconsciously activated defense mechanisms in survival mode. But there are many other symptoms. In order to avoid death, humans, like other primates can engage in deception, disassociation, aggression, manipulation, submission, scapegoating, theft and hoarding. If someone held me at gun point and told me to prove the earth was flat, I would have no problem doing it. The math would work, I would just need to fake a little data

Most scientists have highly valued knowledge and competencies and thus live in situations where their lives are not under threat. At least not as a result of their scientific practice. For the sake of this thought experiment, lets just rule out regularly occurring life-threatening danger as a cause of scientists exhibiting survival mode behaviors. This leaves the perception that they are under threat, as a possible explanation.

It takes only a few stimuli to induce survival mode behavioral changes in animals. Like hearing a frightful noise when seeing an animal. This animal and anything that looks like it become automatic sources of anxiety and fear even without the sound. Imagine being told over and over and over that you have to have an exciting study with powerful results in order to get an academic job after graduate school, otherwise you wasted 3-8 years of your life and probably a large chunk of capital on getting a PhD. Could this alone, without introducing any actual shocks or physical pain, induce Pavlovian fear? I encourage you to go ask any graduate student to answer this that does not yet have such a study.

Now imagine that during graduate school a student invests all their time and resources into an experiment. After it is complete, they hypothesized result, the one sure to be exciting and publishable, is not there. Imagine the horror, the shame, the feeling of failure, the panic. Remember the poor soul who leaped to his death because he misunderstood futures trading and thought he owed three-quarters of a million dollars? That was a triggered survival response. Because dying felt like the only way to ‘survive’ the horror of facing that debt. Imagine if he could have just changed the futures market by adding his own numbers to the market. Would he have done it?

We should not be surprised at all then, when scientists acting out of fear-based survival strategies, fake data. Diederik Stapel faked an entire career of data before being caught. His behavior was self-described as an “addiction”. A common reaction of individuals placed under fear stimuli that are emotionally damaging if not traumatic. The intense pressures and expectations of the academic environment created a context in which he felt compelled to engage in unethical practices to maintain his status and success. It does not make murder or data-faking right, but to not take this as grounds for indicting the scientific rewards system is certainly wrong.

The incentive structures have to change before we can honestly expect the fear-driven pressure to fake, cheat, lie or steal – in order to avoid the experience of loss associated with the common null results that occur when conducting high quality scientific research on radically complex human brains and societies that are frustratingly difficult to measure things in – to go away.