Grant pressure amps up the scientific cheating?

Well this is provocative. One James Hicks has a new opinion bit in The Scientist that covers the usual ground about ethics, paper retractions and the like in the sciences. It laments several decades of “Responsible Conduct of Research” training and the apparent utter failure of this to do anything about scientific misconduct. Dr. Hicks has also come up with a very provocative and truthy graph. From the article it appears to plot annual data from 1997 to 2011 in which the retraction rate (from this Nature article) is plotted against the NIH Success Rate (from Science Insider).

Like I said, it appears truthy. Decreasing grant success is associated with increasing retraction rates. Makes a lot of sense. Desperate times drive the weak to desperate measures.

Of course, the huge caveat is the third factor…..time. There has been a lot more attention paid to scientific retractions lately. Nobody knows if increased retraction rates over time are being observed because fraud is up or because detection is up. It is nearly impossible to ever discover this. Since NIH grant success rates have likewise been plummeting as a function of Fiscal Year, the relationship is confounded.