Careers and career pressures in biomedical science -- Hypercompetition for research grants -- "Doing science" : from hypothesis to publication -- Scientific fraud -- and fraudulent fraudsters -- A broken scientific publishing system -- The way forward

"Scientists specializing in the in-depth analysis of the published scientific literature have to the conclusion that a large part of the scientific literature covers results that cannot be replicated in other independent laboratories. Scientists take this to mean that the results are unreliable or untrue. In this book, biomedical researcher Csaba Szabo summarizes the causes and consequences of this so-called "reproducibility crisis" in biomedical research. The range of causes is wide, from the specificities of the methods used, through various pitfalls in the design of experiments and analysis of experimental data (e.g., confirmation bias), plagiarism and deliberate data falsification, to the systematic publication of fictitious experiments that have never been performed. Through a few blatant examples - e.g. Anil Potti (Duke University); Piero Anversa (Harvard University) - Szabo describes the damaging impact that blatant fraud can have on the development of an entire field of science, and introduces some of the maverick "science investigators" - often working in anonymity - who devote their lives to tracking down and exposing scientific fraudsters. The book also answers the questions (a) what individual and systemic factors are involved in allowing these phenomena to occur, (b) why the appropriate steps have not been taken to control them, and (c) what the implications of the crisis are for the future of medicine and, within it, for the development of new drugs"--