The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science [Hardcover]

To me the most valuable parts of the book are those exposing the details of investigations and the politics of fraud. In my experience the general public is not aware of how science actually works, but rather embraces an idealistic, naive picture of science as a self-correcting system that reveals "truth" about the world. In reality, this is true about science inasmuch as it is true that politicians make decisions that are in the best interest of the general public.
My experience as a scientist is also that scientific community does not discuss fundamental problems of fraud openly, if at all, but leaves it to young scientists to learn it the hard way that science nowadays is not very different from politics or show business. Cherry-picking the data that fit your needs in a highly competitive environment has become a standard that only a few can afford to violate, and faking the data is not that rare either.
This book is therefore a valuable document for both the general public and young people considering science as a career. Much of the criticism I see in the reviews boils down to staring at the finger when someone is pointing to the Moon. The book raises important questions by documenting the workings of modern science, and these questions should not be ignored.

I really wanted to read about fraud in science. It is an important topic, which should interest most of us, not least those who research. And, there are interesting stories told here indeed, and much to think about. I especially enjoyed reading about the Baltimore case. And, I can think of many reasons to discuss the potential problem with current science funding and system for academic recognition. Personally I find that this book has plenty enough of information to deserve more stars than some reviewers give it here at Amazon.

However, I too found that the book lost energy after a while, the same arguments were repeated, the analysis seemed a bit thin, but the pages long.
Fraud in science is interesting stuff, and I was a little sad to admit to myself I was getting bored. Please someone, follow-up with a deeply researched and detailed account of later cases, and dare to discuss more the motives of fraud.

First of all, this is not really a book about fraud in science. The analysis of specific cases of scientific fraud is thin and focused mostly on procedural matters; actual science behind each case is almost completely missing from Judson's analysis. His analysis of fraud as a phenomenon is even more superficial. For all the 400-plus pages of pomp, he fails to look at the obvious: what drives scientists to work in science? A quick look at a randomly selected group of postgraduate students would have revealed that there is a very broad distribution of reasons, ranging from the very global (desire to better understand the surrounding reality) to practical (making a living), to idiosyncratic personal reasons (e.g., looking smart in the eyes of the opposite sex). Where there is a distribution of motivations, there will be a distribution of rules by which people play - including some people bending the rules unacceptably far. Sociology of science is probably as complex as of the society at large; and as in any complex group, fraud is unavoidable.

Which brings us to the second point. Judson's real reason for writing this book seems to be the critique of the ways by which science is funded and by which scientific publishing works. He uses the existence of fraud to attack the existing system of scientific publishing (formal, peer-reviewed, commercially run journals) and claims that a transition to an arXiv-style system will all but eliminate scientific fraud. Unfortunately, his arguments are thouroughly unconvincing. The way scientific results are reported and published may well have a second-order effect on the incidence of fraud, but it is hardly the determining factor of the latter. Risk-vs-benefit factors - what one has to gain by publishing high-profile papers - seems to have much more to do with the occurence of fraud. Because the scientific establishment is not a uniform, Mertonian-type system, there will always be cheaters. The only reason they have not used arXiv so far is that currently one has nothing to gain by submitting a fraudulent publication there. This would change as soon as arXiv became the primary mode of scientific publishing.

Judson's recipe seems to be based on an over-simplified, neo-positivist philosophy of science, with its inherent assumption that scientific community is an ideal, uniform collection of people without agendas, personal ambitions, or theories to prove - what one might call an "ideal-gas approximation" of the scientific community. This might be to a limited degree applicable to biomedical research, which consists largely of data mining, but it completely breaks down in natural sciences. His arguments for open publishing are thus largely ideologically driven, and in his push for the desired conclusion he contradicts both the logic and himself. Of known cases of fraud, how many were caught by people scrutinizing someone else's published papers? Perhaps 10%? Most were discovered by chance - by a postdoc digging up old lab books; a technician noticing dodgy practises; by historians going through old raw data; by an author accidentally coming across an article identical to his own. This seems to be Judson's conclusion as well. Why does he think that community-scrutinized arXiv publishing would be more self-correcting than peer-reviewed traditional publishing? Both logic and experience suggest otherwise. Peer review may be costly, awkward, and inefficient, but it does keep junk science in journals with impact factors <1 - which noone reads. Without it, scientific publishing will quickly become awash with self-posted garbage (for a proof, look at the percentage of garbage on the Internet - it's hardly lower than in published journals!) Judson evades this obvious fact by saying that even garbage papers eventually get published in peer-reviewed journals, conveniently omitting that in most cases they get published in journals which have no impact.

To be sure, the book does contain a few fresh ideas. The first couple of chapters provide a good discourse in the philosophy of science. Some ideas regarding ArXiv are also quite nice, as long as they are not presented as some magic bullet which will miraculously eliminate scientific fraud. But were these worth reading through 400 pages of naive populism written by someone who, by own admission, has never been a practising scientist? I'd say no.