there are many separate problems of scientific fraud. I think these issues sometimes get confused which is unhelpful.
1. apparently-legitimate papers in prestigious journals with fraudulent data. extremely bad.
2. legitimate papers in legitimate journals which, innocently or not, just used bad methods and have wrong conclusions. this is "the replication crisis".
3. totally fake papers in paper mills with no meaningful peer review. it's really easy to spot these, no one is individually getting taken in by the results, but...
3a. sometimes they wind up in a meta-analysis, which is really bad because people might trust the meta analysis.
Problem 1 is morally worst and much more common than one would hope. Outright fabricated data in a Nature or NEJM publication (as has happened) is a disaster.
Problem 2 is amenable to reform for the most part (fields are already doing this).
Problem 3 isn't a problem at all for scientific knowledge per se, although universities and funding bodies might not be pleased their scientists are buying fake papers. You can just ignore the paper mills.
But Problem 3a can actually alter policy, which is pretty serious.
1. apparently-legitimate papers in prestigious journals with fraudulent data. extremely bad.
2. legitimate papers in legitimate journals which, innocently or not, just used bad methods and have wrong conclusions. this is "the replication crisis".
3. totally fake papers in paper mills with no meaningful peer review. it's really easy to spot these, no one is individually getting taken in by the results, but...
3a. sometimes they wind up in a meta-analysis, which is really bad because people might trust the meta analysis.
Problem 1 is morally worst and much more common than one would hope. Outright fabricated data in a Nature or NEJM publication (as has happened) is a disaster.
Problem 2 is amenable to reform for the most part (fields are already doing this).
Problem 3 isn't a problem at all for scientific knowledge per se, although universities and funding bodies might not be pleased their scientists are buying fake papers. You can just ignore the paper mills.
But Problem 3a can actually alter policy, which is pretty serious.