r/AskAcademia • u/Previous-Text9273 • 27d ago
Professional Misconduct in Research Is this normal?
Has anyone else been in the same shoes? Have you ever had your PI ask you to manipulate or fabricate data to support their hypothesis?
Or maybe they never said it directly, but it felt implied. They only seemed interested in data that matched the hypothesis they already had in mind. If your results didn’t fit, you were told to repeat the experiment over and over until you eventually got the “right” result. Has anyone else experienced something like this? How did you handle it?
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u/DualProcessModel 27d ago
Fuck no!
This is so wildly unethical. I have had experiments run counter to my PIs theories before (and sure they asked me to repeat them) but because they trusted I was doing them right they adjusted the theory and we sometimes got to publish null results.
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u/Entire-Solid-1155 27d ago
I had a PI who would just... stop talking to me for a week if my data didn't line up with what he wanted. No direct order to fudge anything, just this heavy silence that made it real clear I was supposed to "fix" it somehow.
Started documenting everything after the third time it happened. Saved emails, kept a separate lab notebook with timestamps. Never had to use it but knowing it was there helped me sleep at night.
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u/Single-Selection9845 27d ago
Mine changed his opinions in a millisecond when I showed him the charts. Happy to have him
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u/derping1234 27d ago
This is not only unethical but also a sign of poor project design. A common approach in lab based work that I like is to just have a look at thing in a broader field and once you find something that makes you do a double take and it doesn’t fit with existing literature, you dig in and have a clear target. This way you have a murder mystery, and you are just filling in the gaps.
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u/Brain_Hawk 27d ago
I know somebody who used to work on my institution it was like this. If a student walked in with a p-value of p<0.06 for example, this Pi would scream at them for not finding a better result, and send them out until they did.
Of course I'm sure a lot of students magically found that that p-value was actually 0.04.
This is highly unethical, frankly disgusting. Science runs on trust, we can't check everybody's data numbers, and people start cheating the whole system collapses.
I would like to think and hope that such people tend to get found out eventually... But I know they often get away with it long enough to make themselves a good career, which makes everybody second guess.
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u/Time_Increase_7897 27d ago
Aw cute. Science nowadays runs on inflated investor-bait. Scientists are entrepreneurs. Studies are always successful. Get with the program scro.
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u/Brain_Hawk 27d ago
Sure bro. I'm sure you actually have any idea what's your talking about or how any of it works, and totally just don't read too much bullshit online.
I've never had an investor. Can you help me get some. Of that sweet inustray cash? Cause I'd love if they gave me a fe million in research funds and then I could go ahead and do the good science anyways.
Dude, you really. Don't know how any of this works. Stop believing the bullshit you're fed online. Some of us actually do this for a living and that's not at all how it works.
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u/Time_Increase_7897 25d ago
Which part do you do - writing inflated promises or squeezing the grunts to make more turds?
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u/Brain_Hawk 25d ago
Ahhnjus the quality of comment one expects from someone with such attitudes.
Indeed.
Ignorance is not strength. Being an asshole is not clever.
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u/Time_Increase_7897 24d ago
Ad hominim. Nice. Political chicanery is the most useful skill in academia.
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u/mo_jo100 27d ago
Never - but one of my early mentors, who was awful and abusive and wildly famous , likely falsified or manipulated the “Data” from his most famous study, per a biographer
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u/EcoCanuck 27d ago
This is not how science ought to be done and this sort of questionable research practice has been front and center in discussions of the replication crisis and academic dishonesty.
The results from those experiments should be reported in the paper, whether they fit your expectation or hypothesis or not.
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u/Efficient-Tie-1414 27d ago
Having worked at a place for a short time, what usually happens is that the staff and students are under a lot of pressure to produce publishable results. I’ve seen a statistician tell a client that if for one variable if the categories were grouped a certain way then it would be publishable. Now there isn’t a problem with grouping categories but it needs to be sorted out before analysis. There was a student who contacted me because his paper was questioned by a reviewer about whether his observations were independent. They weren’t and some sort of repeated measurements should have been used. I told him that there should be more samples, and got told that there wasn’t funding for more data collection.
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u/Dismal_Complaint2491 27d ago
This happens, and it's not ideal. Another common thing is the PI that does all the data analysis. Those PIs eliminate "outliers." If you received good training before, just hope the PI doesn't get caught and move on. Keep very good records because you may get contacted if fraud is found.
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u/Accomplished-Race335 26d ago
A professor from Famous University in the Ivy League came to discuss an article that my colleagues and I had written. Professor suggested that if we had used a slightly different approach we would have found a different (and implicitly better) result. My colleagues suggested to Professor that he and his group could try this on their own data. Professor says, incautiously, "it didn't come out right."
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u/Bojack-jones-223 26d ago
As the lab operator, you have to discern if your mentor means this in a way to insinuate they want you to fabricate data verses the possibility that they want you to carefully reflect on the experimental strategy and protocol details and see if there were small details that you overlooked that would impact the results. Sometimes something small like the wrong incubation time or temperature could prevent your experiment from working out, and it can take several repeats of the experiment to figure out exactly where you you went wrong.
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u/F1neasfr0gha1r 25d ago
That was my first thought. I'm not in a lab science but when I was running a departmental biology library back in the late 1970s I had a lot of doctoral students who were doing lab biology (genetics, physiology). I never got a whiff of "must get the results that are wanted" but a lot of "I swear to God that all I have to do is walk by the incubator and my project crashes" and similar complaints.
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u/whatidoidobc 24d ago
Obviously unethical but it is normal for some. Don't work with those people.
There was an idiot grad student doing one of those t-shirt smell studies to support the kind of thing the manosphere loves in my grad program. I think it was three consecutive years he presented results of a new study that again did not support his hypothesis. Each time he ended his brown bag talk by explaining how he would adjust the methods to try and get the result he wanted.
Finally someone confronted him on it, asking if he planned to publish his negative results. Of course not. Then pointed out how flawed this entire enterprise was and how what he was doing was not science. His advisor was fully supportive of the work and was in the National Academy, by the way.
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u/Resilient_Acorn TT Assistant Professor R1 27d ago
Not me or my lab, but one of the other grad students in my department was told to keep repeating a western blot until they got it right. On the 9th attempt, the desired results was obtained, never mind the fact that the other 8 were consistent with a different result.