The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, is seeking to retract six scientific studies and correct 31 others that were published by the institute’s top researchers, including its CEO. The researchers are accused of manipulating data images with simple methods, primarily with copy-and-paste in image editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop.
The incentives have become twisted across academia by the criteria used to allocate funding. Everyone has to produce striking results constantly so they can get published and cited, since funding depends on these crude measures of prestige. This just doesn’t sit easily with undertaking research out of honest curiosity regardless of the results. So in humanities people hype trivia, and in sciences people do that and are also tempted to twist boring results for more impact. You end up with phenomena like this:
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