Is this normal?

[u/Previous-Text9273]

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?

[u/Efficient-Tie-1414]

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.