@BryanKrause Well, I've always thought that the only defense against this type of behaviour is that of lowering, by a fair amount, the importance that the academic world gives to publication record and awards (which I'd remove entirely) for hiring and career advancement.

For instance, if I look at my country, there are totally twisted career advancement and university funding processes based on publication counts, as I explained a bit here. This kind of processes, which are usually conceived with the idea of making the hiring process more "systematic" and "scientific", possibly fighting nepotism, are fertile ground for frauds.

@MassimoOrtolano Agreed, that sets up some perverse incentives. I definitely find emphasis on publication counts in particular to be problematic, though I don't think one can discard publication record entirely in assessing academics - after all, our job is to produce and share knowledge with others

I think there are also incentives coming from the grant side of things, where applicants for grants are expected to have the biggest most exciting project ideas. The US NIH is getting a bit better about asking for statistical reviews of proposed projects with power analyses and whatnot, but as far as I can tell so far it's mostly lip service. If you go to them and say "yeah, I need 5 years to conduct this sufficiently powered study that isn't going to immediately solve cancer and AD together"...

...they're going to say "okay, and...that's it?" So instead I'm betting a lot of these people are over-promising what they can deliver and resort to making their data look like it "should" look based on their hypotheses rather than actually doing the experiments

What I don't understand how anyone caught doing this doesn't immediately become impossible to fund or work with.