Research misconduct: how the scientific community is fighting back
Nature Podcast
[email protected]
4.4 • 859 Ratings
🗓️ 8 September 2025
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2016, Brian Wansink wrote a blog post that prompted scientific sleuths to investigate his work. They found evidence of data manipulation, and, after several news articles and two investigations by his institution, he would found to have committed misconduct, as defined by Cornell University. His work had been used to inform US policy around food, much of which has now been thrown into question.
Cases like this are rare, but science is not immune to misconduct. The rise in 'paper mills' — organisations that produce questionable or fake papers that they sell authorships on — has led some to worry that misconduct is on the rise and that a proportion of the scientific literature cannot be trusted.
In episode two of Self Correction, we explore how researchers are responding to the problem of research misconduct. We discuss how difficult it is to determine the prevalence of misconduct, and how sleuths, journalists and research integrity institutions are fighting back.
This episode was written and produced by Nick Petrić Howe. Dan Fox was the editor. The music was provided by Triple Scoop Music.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 1:04.0 | A bunch of volunteer data sleuths from around the world started digging into these papers about pizza eating, |
| 1:15.5 | and they found just within these four papers 150 inconsistencies and errors in the data. |
| 1:23.9 | This is Stephanie M. Lee, a journalist from the Chronicle of Higher Education who writes about |
| 1:30.0 | research integrity. These papers came from the lab of Brian Wonsink, a high-profile diet's researcher |
| 1:37.7 | at Cornell, who Stephanie wrote about. He was in a very influential position, and a lot of his |
| 1:43.9 | research boiled down to the message |
| 1:46.7 | that you can eat healthier and lose weight without having to make drastic changes to your diet |
| 1:54.4 | and exercise. Unsurprisingly, such results caught a lot of people's attention, landing him a position in the US Department of Agriculture |
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