Jonathan Pruitt saw spiders do remarkable things. The evolutionary ecologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario claimed that the “personalities” of African social spiders played a major role in the tasks they performed. Bold and aggressive spiders, for example, were more likely to be hunters and group leaders. Pruitt’s fascinating observations rocketed him to prominence and he accumulated a long list of academic publications; in 2018 was named a Canada 150 Research Chair, one of the youngest scholars to be given the honour.
By 2020, however, Pruitt’s co-authors were having doubts about the reliability of his data and methods. By 2022, 150 of his papers were under scrutiny and a year later he resigned from McMaster following an exhaustive investigation that found he’d repeatedly engaged in data “falsification and fabrication”. Today, perhaps fittingly, he is a fantasy novelist.
Pruitt’s case seems outrageous – but it’s by no means unique. Revelations of academic malfeasance and error seem to be everywhere these days. Last year Claudine Gay, Harvard University’s first black president, was forced to resign after she was found to have committed plagiarism. Canadian-born neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned as president of California’s Stanford University in 2023 after an investigation found “serious flaws” in his work on Alzheimer’s disease.
And the well-publicized transgressions of Pruitt, Gay and Tessier-Lavigne are just the tip of the iceberg. Many other cases at major institutions receive no media attention. In 2022, for example, Romina Mizrahi, currently a psychiatry professor at McGill University, was sanctioned for “intentionally, knowingly or recklessly falsifying data” in U.S. grant applications.
Universities have long cultivated reputations as places of wisdom and integrity where scholars track and expand society’s collective knowledge. Lately, however, it seems many scholars are too busy making stuff up to care much about wisdom or knowledge. What‘s going on inside the ivory towers?
Retraction Watch is a free website that tracks academic papers pulled from publication because of serious errors or fraud. Last year it counted 13,000 such retractions, a record high. According to co-founder Ivan Oransky, this steady stream of academic errors is a constant reminder that science is not flawless and scientists are not unimpeachable. “We’ve somehow been sold this bill of goods that just because a paper is peer-reviewed and published that it is somehow perfect,” he says. “That’s simply not the case. Science is done by human beings.”
Oransky estimates a mere 10 percent of flawed or fraudulent papers are properly identified and retracted. The rest slip under the radar, suggesting academic bad behaviour is even more prevalent than it appears.
Working hard to expose scholarly malfeasance is a host of independent scientific investigators. Among the most accomplished of these sleuths is Elizabeth Bik. “What fuels me is anger at people who cheat,” Bik says in an interview with C2C Journal. “How can people be so dishonest?” Since 2014 Bik has analyzed more than 100,000 papers and found signs of dishonesty in 6,500 of them.
One of Bik’s specialties is tracking down and exposing “paper mills.” As she explains, “These are networks of individuals who create false or low-quality [academic] papers, and sell the authorships to students and researchers who need the papers for their careers … These fake papers cause all kinds of scandals.” The world’s biggest offender: China.
Among the many ambitions of the Communist Party of China’s leader Xi Jinping is to see his country respected around the world as a scientific superpower. To achieve this, his government has prioritized volume above all else in academic research, with poisonous results.
Last year the journal Research Ethics published a shocking exposé based on anonymous interviews with Chinese professors. “I had no choice but to commit misconduct,” admitted one scientist. Cheating was essential if he was to meet the impossible publication goals set for him; this included paying others to write papers for him, bribing officials for access to information and altering data to fit his research hypotheses.
Constant demands that Chinese scholars prioritize efficiency over integrity has caused the reliability of Chinese research to plummet. According to a survey by Nature, of 9,600 retractions from one publisher, 8,200 had a co-author in China.
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that North American universities are immune to the pressures undermining China’s scientific research output. The same pernicious requirement that academic staff “publish or perish” is well established in Canadian and U.S. universities as well. As Bik recently observed on X, “In a ‘publish or perish’ culture, some scientists may resort to questionable research practices or even fraud.”
Given the apparent outbreak of academic malpractice, it is noteworthy that the most significant work being done currently to bring attention to the problem is coming from private efforts such as Retraction Watch and lone warriors such as Bik. There’s little evidence the academic world is collectively committed to going after the problem in any serious way.
Recall the case of McGill’s Mizrahi. In 2022 she admitted to manipulating data from her research into addictions to falsely improve the statistical relevance. A deception like this could send a corporate CEO to prison; yet the only substantial sanction Mizrahi faced was having her work supervised by a committee of her peers for one year.
Fearful of damaging their own reputations, universities are generally loathe to bring attention to evidence of academic malfeasance by their scholars or to harshly punish those caught. And rather than suffer the ignominy of being fired, most transgressors are allowed to resign or move to another institution.
This behaviour has serious consequences for the real world. Mizrahi’s actions may have set back actual progress in addiction research. The same goes for Tessier-Lavigne’s now-retracted work on Alzheimer’s. Every wrong step made by science, whether intentional or not, pushes the search for the truth farther down the road. It’s time to demand better from our institutions of higher learning.
Lynne Cohen is a non-practicing lawyer based in Ottawa. The original, longer version of this story first appeared in www.C2CJournal.ca
