I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?
&gt; Science is supposed to be self-correcting.<p>I admire the author&#x27;s belief, not least because I used to be like that, but I personally think that couldn&#x27;t be further form the truth for contemporary scientific research, and it&#x27;s no better in evidence-base physical sciences. I personally know many people who used to be, or still are, in scientific research who wouldn&#x27;t hesitate to agree with me that scientific research is mostly just a job for most people that&#x27;s not too different to any other job that earns you a salary.<p>I always ended up not posting my comment in related topics, but since this is getting so much traction, I might as well try not to appear to be bitter about my own experience and give my anecdote another go. If nothing else, at least this will become (albeit insignificant) a piece of history that stays on the Internet.<p>I long time ago I received a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship to work with someone very well-known in the field on studying the mechanisms of a then relatively new type of chemical reactions. I spent a couple of months to meticulously prepare everything I needed for the study, and when finally I got everything ready, I began by reproducing the first break-through that was produced in the group that started it all -- and it didn&#x27;t work.<p>Since I was new to that particular type of chemistry at that time, I spent the next few months trying to reproduce the reaction while getting others, both within and without the group, to check my work. Nobody seemed to be able to figure out what I did wrong but one particularly thing stood out at that time: nobody I have spoken to actually tried to reproduce the results of the &quot;first&quot; reaction, ever, which was super strange to me. I had also spoken with my advisor then, who basically became well-known because of that first reaction, and he couldn&#x27;t offer any solutions and the conversation always ended up being something completely unrelated to the irreproducible results. I spent most of that time blaming myself and suffering from some form of imposter syndrome, too, simply because I have the tendency to do that.<p>Up till that point I had been following the procedure published in a journal article, but I thought I would dig up the first author&#x27;s PhD thesis to check what I had done wrong. I started by casually scrolling through the experimental section and an C-13 NMR spectrum of the catalyst that I was working with caught my eye immediately because of some very unnatural signal truncation that I thought was only possible with data manipulation, and sent the data to a few of my friends who are experts in NMR and they also confirmed that those &quot;artifacts&quot; are most certainly unnatural. I immediately e-mailed my advisor about it, but he never responded -- and that was the only e-mail from me (which obviously required a response) that he never responded to.<p>I did find a few manipulated spectra in the same PhD thesis, but none of that really helped because I still couldn&#x27;t reproduce the results that <i>nobody</i> has ever mentioned anything wrong about. Then one night, when I was drinking with the group, someone working on a different floor I don&#x27;t usually talk to about my work asked me how things were going; after I told him my problems he immediately said that he&#x27;d met someone from industry at a conference complaining to him that the reaction doesn&#x27;t work. He also said that a few people who came before me also tried to reproduce that reaction but none of them got it to work.<p>At that point I was just angry because *I thought &quot;science is supposed to be self-correcting&quot;* and there is no way that this stuff was in the literature for 10 years and nobody ever said anything about it. In fact, it&#x27;s impossible for my advisor to not know that something is wrong with it because he is very well connected to both academia and industry, and so many people in the 10 years before I arrived must have worked on it.<p>During the time I was unable to get anything to work, I was constantly assigned work that seem somewhat related to what I do but wouldn&#x27;t help me with my career in any way. In the end I had a hunch on what was really happened and determined that the procedures in the original paper and the PhD thesis that first reported the reaction were all out by a factor of 10. I was already on anti-depressants at that point and was drunk every night but was working 10+ hours a day, which was well-known in the group. When I had finally gotten the reaction to &quot;work&quot; (and had explained to people I trust and had them double check my work) and brought it to my advisor, he said &quot;that&#x27;s great&quot;; I don&#x27;t remember too well what else he&#x27;d said in between because none of it was neither an apology nor a solution, but he said at the end that maybe I should have deferred my fellowship because of my depression (which, frankly, wasn&#x27;t affecting my ability to work).<p>This is not an isolated case, and not the only type of academic misconduct. The thing that upsets us the most is that at the end of the day, it&#x27;s not about how good and meticulous you are: for most of us it&#x27;s mostly about how well you are at gaming the system. The way we fund scientific research is mostly broken, the way we disseminate scientific research is mostly broken, the way we assess potentially great scientists and appoint them is also mostly broken. It&#x27;s only natural that, for most people, the experience is nothing but shit.<p>Edit: typo.