It may have been the former professional ice hockey player and philanthropist Mats Sundin who in an interview first opened my eyes to the many analogies between professional sports and academic research, including of course the competitive personalities of elite athletes and researchers. There are also - unfortunately - many parallels between cheating in sports and scientific research. However, this is also where the stories diverge.
The analogies between sports and academia break down with research institutions, publishers and funding organizations having done little to deal with research misconduct, routinely ignoring appeals for retractions and allowing cheaters to replace fabricated results with better fabricated ones, as reported by Retraction Watch, Microbiome Digest and others. This is the equivalent of allowing athletes to submit another doping test weeks or months after the positive test and letting them keep any medals won while doped.
But the differences do not end there. In sports, the consequences of getting caught are not limited to the individual athlete testing positive. If one member of an olympic ice hockey team is caught doping, the entire team is disqualified. If a country systematically assists their athletes cheat and get caught, the entire country is banned from competing under their own flag. There isn’t anything remotely comparable in the research community, where institutions routinely sweep research misconduct under the carpet. If the misconduct was committed by a student or postdoc, individual punishment such as suspension or termination of contract can be meted out. But the principal investigator in whose group the data was fabricated, and who benefited from the work as last and corresponding author, rarely has to face the music. Nobel Prizes cannot even be revoked, though a quick cross-referencing between PubPeer and recent laureates suggests several prime candidates. At higher levels of organization (department, faculty, institution), there does not appear to be any negative fallout from covering up research misconduct. It is as if reputation, based on rankings, publications and citations are more important than doing the right thing, engaging with the scientific community, conducting transparent investigations and helping publishers retract papers.
As in sports, we are unlikely to make progress as long as we only punish the people directly committing the research fraud, and not the investigators, institutions, publishers and funders who benefit from the work, in crass economic terms or as less tangible prestige. At the very least, failure to properly respond and investigate research misconduct should have negative consequences also for investigators, departments and institutions, rather than allowing the same to keep reaping the benefits from fabricated research as long as the papers or awards are not retracted.
So, what’s the solution? Funding agencies could note which universities deal properly with research misconduct allegations and which do not, and take this into account when awarding grants. Researchers at institutions found to systematically ignore or suppress accusations of research misconduct could be banned from applying for research funding for a time. This is a form of collective punishment, but it is not entirely unfair, as all researchers at the institution benefited from its reputation, however attained. It is also important that grants and awards, as far as possible, can and are retracted in case of misconduct in the work on which the grants or awards were based. This is common for titles and medals in sports, but unheard of in science. The very possibility of these consequences will make institutions take research integrity much more seriously, hire and fund good research integrity officers, and elevate the ultimate responsibility for research integrity from the individual researcher to the institution.