https://medianwatch.netlify.app/tags/fraud/ Recent content in fraud on Median Watch Hugo -- gohugo.io en-uk Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://medianwatch.netlify.app/post/breadcrumbs/ Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://medianwatch.netlify.app/post/breadcrumbs/ Breadcrumbs feature in the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel where two lone children drop them along their journey into the forest so that they can find their way home. I’ve been thinking a lot about breadcrumbs and paper trails because the research world is rapidly moving to widely using artificial intelligence, including for generating questions, collecting data, and writing papers. Whilst these uses may sometimes be legitimate and make for faster and better research, it’s now also possible for bad actors to use AI to make a decent quality paper in just 30 minutes. https://medianwatch.netlify.app/post/ai_grants/ Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://medianwatch.netlify.app/post/ai_grants/ Last week, I blocked out two hours of protected time in my diary for “grant writing”. I’ve done this before, but the difference this time was that at the end of two hours I had a nearly finished NHMRC Ideas Grant. Of course I used AI. I used PRISM, a new free tool from OpenAI designed for academic writing. I gave PRISM the Ideas Grant criteria, a document on what makes a good application, and a title and an aim. https://medianwatch.netlify.app/post/ai_slop/ Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://medianwatch.netlify.app/post/ai_slop/ Science prides itself on being self-correcting. While scientific fakery has always been a problem, cases of fraud have been isolated, and a combination of scepticism and scrutiny has up to now generally worked to highlight published papers that are unreliable. The 30 minute paper However, the world of research and publishing is changing. The introduction of agentic artificial intelligence (AI) allows an automated assembly line of research tasks without any human checkpoints. https://medianwatch.netlify.app/post/baseline_testing/ Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://medianwatch.netlify.app/post/baseline_testing/ When fraudsters make up research data, they can make mistakes. Real data is rich and complex whilst fraudsters are on a get-rich-quick scheme and make slapdash errors. One mistake they make is in randomised trials, where it’s standard to have a baseline table that compares the randomised groups. As the groups are randomised, the summary statistics should be similar. Fraudsters have no sense of ‘similar’ and so have created data where the groups are nearly identical. https://medianwatch.netlify.app/post/van_gogh/ Wed, 19 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://medianwatch.netlify.app/post/van_gogh/ Originally published in the Deeble and AusHSI newsletter. Vincent van Gogh only sold a few paintings during his lifetime and died a poor man. After he died, his sister-in-law, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, cleverly built his reputation and created a thriving market for his paintings. Recent sales have been over USD $80 million. Vincent was both truly gifted and desperately unlucky. Soon after his paintings started to sell, van Gogh was the victim of fraud. https://medianwatch.netlify.app/post/research_fraud/ Fri, 23 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://medianwatch.netlify.app/post/research_fraud/ Reposted from The Conversation. Fraud in science is alarmingly common. Sometimes researchers lie about results and invent data to win funding and prestige. Other times, researchers might pay to stage and publish entirely bogus studies to win an undeserved pay rise – fuelling a “paper mill” industry worth an estimated €1 billion a year. Some of this rubbish can be easily spotted by peer reviewers, but the peer review system has become badly stretched by ever-rising paper numbers.