  There is a severe tension between the observed star formation rate (SFR) -
stellar mass (${\rm M}_{\star}$) relations reported by different authors at $z
= 1-4$. In addition, the observations have not been successfully reproduced by
state-of-the-art cosmological simulations which tend to predict a factor of 2-4
smaller SFRs at a fixed ${\rm M}_{\star}$. We examine the evolution of the
SFR$-{\rm M}_{\star}$ relation of $z = 1-4 $ galaxies using the SKIRT simulated
spectral energy distributions of galaxies sampled from the EAGLE simulations.
We derive SFRs and stellar masses by mimicking different observational
techniques. We find that the tension between observed and simulated SFR$-{\rm
M}_{\star}$ relations is largely alleviated if similar methods are used to
infer the galaxy properties. We find that relations relying on infrared
wavelengths (e.g. 24 ${\rm \mu m}$, MIPS - 24, 70 and 160 ${\rm \mu m}$ or
SPIRE - 250, 350, 500 ${\rm \mu m}$) have SFRs that exceed the intrinsic
relation by 0.5 dex. Relations that rely on the spectral energy distribution
fitting technique underpredict the SFRs at a fixed stellar mass by -0.5 dex at
$z \sim 4$ but overpredict the measurements by 0.3 dex at $z \sim 1$. Relations
relying on dust-corrected rest-frame UV luminosities, are flatter since they
overpredict/underpredict SFRs for low/high star forming objects and yield
deviations from the intrinsic relation from 0.10 dex to -0.13 dex at $z \sim
4$. We suggest that the severe tension between different observational studies
can be broadly explained by the fact that different groups employ different
techniques to infer their SFRs.

Astrophysics of Galaxies;Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics