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Comment by SkyMarshal | Hacker News Reader

> Academic scientists' careers are driven by publishing, citations and impact.

Publishing and citations can and are gamed, but is impact also gamed on a wide scale? That one seems harder to fake. Either a result is true and useful, or it's not.

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Actual real world impact? Hard to game. But, nobody measures that. Everything that's tracked is a circularly defined success metric (you're successful if other academics consider you successful).

The article mentions that there are two drugs that resulted from this research. One of them failed a trial recently. Nobody knows if this fraud means that the drug never could have worked, or if this was just bad luck. So yes: people do measure real-world impact. It's just that it takes a very long time and there are plenty of confounding factors, since even non-fraudulent drug research can fail.

That's true for the rare case that something turns into a professionally run and controlled trial (incidentally there's evidence for many published clinical trials also being fake). But very little research output is ever tested that way. Most doesn't even claim it could have real world impact in principle.

What you're observing is that most research results don't have much impact. The ones that get replicated are definitionally the ones that matter the most, since they lead to controlled trials. In principle this is a pretty reasonable way to allocate limited resources.

Convince (lobby) a politician that your research will save the trees/whales/global warming/end starvation/any other fear inducing thing and get funding to bribe (lobby) more politicians to further your “research” until anyone would be a fool to question the science.

I feel like this same story happens every year and people are surprised. I often wonder how many “academic” or “scientific” quotes to not conflate valid research and study) need to happen before it becomes as distrusted as politicians.

Academic scientists aren't lobbyists, and politicians aren't giving us money. The funding institutions set research goals. Those funding institutions (staffed by people who actually understand science) don't conduct the research--they choose the winning research plans to fund to achieve their stated goals (1 in 12 applicants, last time I tried). These bureaucrats write budget justifications for Congress--just as the military, Social Security Administration, VA, etc, do. And frankly, compared to those entities, our $40-something billion of the $6 trillion budget is pathetic.

https://static.nationalpriorities.org/images/charts/2021-cha...

https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...

Oh, yes. Repackaging and reframing of data - as mentioned in the OP article too - is a common practice for farming impact and article numbers too.

Why do novel research when you can just partner up with your friends, bring your data and combine with theirs for the umpteenth paper on the same thing, then wade into spamming down the submissions in every academic journal with impact in your field! If it published once in this journal, surely the 3rd recombination will too (and more often than not... it does.)

Impact here actually means citations. They clumsily say citations twice. Underlining the field of bibliometrics is the idea that citations correlates with the impact the a paper has on scientific discourse. It's intentionally vague because its hard to say what even highly cited papers objectively achieve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation_impact

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