Keynote Address

Stuart Ritchie
Lecturer, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience
King’s College London
Scientific Fraud
Stuart J. Ritchie
Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre
King’s College London

stuart.j.ritchie@kcl.ac.uk
@StuartJRitchie
Yoshitaka Fujii
Kranke et al. (2000) Anesth Analg, 90, 1004-7
Proschan & Shaw (2020) PLOS ONE, e0239121
183 retractions

https://www.science.org/content/article/new-record-retractions-part-2
Retraction Watch Leaderboard
Name Subject Number of retractions
1 Yoshitaka Fujii Anaesthesiology 183
2 Joachim Boldt Anaesthesiology 161
3 Yoshihiro Sato Orthopaedics 106
4 Ali Nazari Materials Science 86
5 Jun Iwamoto Orthopaedics 82
6 Diederik Stapel Social Psychology 58
7 Yuhji Saitoh Anaesthesiology 53
8 Adrian Maxim Condensed-Matter Physics 48
9 Chen-Yuan (Peter) Chen Computer Science 43
10= Fazlul Sarkar Oncology 41
10= Shahaboddin Shamshirband Computer Science 41
10= Hua Zhong Crystallography 41
https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-leaderboard/
How many scientists commit fraud?
• Defined as fabrication or falsification of data:

• Have you personally ever committed scientific fraud?

• 1.97% say yes

• Have your colleagues ever committed scientific fraud?

• 14.12% say yes

• Estimates from a meta-analysis of surveys in 2009

• Fanelli (2009) PLOS ONE, 4(5), e5738
How scientific frauds* get
caught
*Disclaimer: Some of the cases described in this talk are just alleged scientific
frauds
How (alleged) scientific
frauds get caught
1. Absurd claims
2. Impossible data
3. Hiding in plain sight
4. Sheer audacity
1. Absurd claims

Hans Ronald
Eysenck Grossarth-Maticek
Personality questionnaire items
• One single item, yes/no response:

• “Can you get a party going?”

• “Do you enjoy sunbathing on the beach?”

Personality questionnaire items
One single item, yes/no response:

“Do you change your behaviour according to consequences of

previous behaviour, i.e., do you repeat ways of acting which have
in the past led to positive results, such as contentment, wellbeing,
self-reliance, etc., and to stop acting in ways which lead to
negative consequences, i.e., to feelings of anxiety, hopelessness,
depression, excitement, annoyance, etc.? In other words, have
you learned to give up ways of acting which have negative
consequences, and to rely more and more on ways of acting
which have positive consequences?”

Pelosi (2019) J Health Psychol 24(4), 421-439

Results
• “Across the decade-long… studies involving 3235 people, 38.5 per cent of the
cancer-prone subjects died of cancer compared with only 0.3 per cent of those
with the healthy personality [the “cancer-prone” subjects had 120 times the
risk].
• Compared with the healthy… subjects, those with the hypothesised heart-
disease-prone personality… were 27 times more likely to die of this condition.
• [In the psychotherapy trial, sixteen] (32%) of the control subjects but none of
the treated subjects died of cancer in the next 13 years.
• “Such results are otherwise unheard of in the entire history of medical
science.”

Quotations from Pelosi (2019) J Health Psychol 24(4), 421-439 [my emphasis]
Timeline
• 1980-1990 – Collaborations published

• 1991/1992 – Critique and debate in the British Medical Journal

• … [absolutely nothing for almost 30 years] …

• May 2019 – King’s College London find dozens of Eysenck/Grossarth-

Maticek papers “unsafe”, recommend retraction

• February 2020 to Now – 14 papers retracted, 71 “expressions of concern”

https://retractionwatch.com/2020/02/12/journals-retract-
three-papers-by-hans-eysenck-flag-18-some-60-years-old/
Is it fraud?
• Fraud vs. extreme sloppiness
• Cyril Burt’s famously fraudulent IQ numbers
might actually just be muddled…
• …but other numbers (and actions) are more
likely fraudulent
• Burt’s student wrote:
• “[Burt] showed me [a] paper he had written
under our joint names, and I thought it was very
good. I was rather surprised when it finally
appeared in the British Journal of Educational
Psychology in 1939 with only my name at the top,
and with many changes in the text praising Cyril
Burt.”
− Hans Eysenck
Sir Cyril Burt
https://retractionwatch.com/2020/0
2/12/journals-retract-three-papers-
by-hans-eysenck-flag-18-some-60-
years-old/
2. Suspicious data
• Jonathan Pruitt
• Rising star in spider biology research

• Posted the data online (open science!)

• Readers noticed data anomalies;
confirmed by co-authors
• At least 17 retractions so far
• Denies any fraud – making legal threats

• Viglione (2020) Nature, 578, 199-200

https://www.popsci.com/jonathan-pruitt-
studies-how-spider-societies-function/
https://laskowskilab.faculty.ucd
avis.edu/2020/01/29/retractions
Nuijten et al. (2016) Behav Res Methods 48(4), 1205-1226
3. Hiding in plain sight

Shen (2020) Nature 581, 132-36

Image manipulation
• Visually(!) checked 20,621 papers from
40 journals
• 3.8% had “problematic” images, of
which around half were likely deliberate

Elisabeth Bik
4. Sheer audacity
• Image manipulation in a 2005
paper in the Journal of
Neurophysiology?

https://pubpeer.com/publications/4A0E7C755FBF30F082FB2121369C58
 Surgisphere and COVID-19

Sapan
Desai
How to commit scientific fraud and not
get caught
• Don’t make absurd claims
• Don’t make the dataset look too artificial
• Don’t hide your fraud in plain sight
• Avoid high-impact journals and hot-button issues (extra
scrutiny)

• Scary thought: how many fraudsters have followed these rules and
are flying under the radar?
Why this keeps happening
• Peer reviewers aren’t expected to pick up on fraud
• And in most cases wouldn’t be able to even they wanted to
• Fraudsters can machine-tool their results to what they know
reviewers and editors want
• Publications, fame, and fortune await successful fraudsters
• Often takes years for detection/punishment
• Some universities cover up their researchers’ fraud

• Do scientists trust each other a bit too much?

Trust, but verify

Don’t forget
this part
 Thanks

stuart.j.ritchie@kcl.ac.uk

@StuartJRitchie
 Keynote Address

Stuart Ritchie
Lecturer, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience
King’s College London