The fraud issues you mention are real and pressing... They're also completely disconnected from blanket cuts to NIH funding. There seems to be some kind of grasping for a positive in heavy cuts to essential research here. Put another way, there is zero selective pressure for 'less fraudulent' research to be cut. If anything, this applies selective pressure on publish or perish, false positive, press release style research. Harsh cuts in funding always penalise blue sky research, controversial work and anything that isn't guaranteed to bring press to the funding institution.

> Run a few plagiarism/LLM checks, fire/expel the worst offenders, and you've already saved a significant fraction of the newfound deficit!

This is absurdly reductive, and doesn't connect with the genuine issues at play incentivising good research and detecting fraud.

> The fraud issues you mention are real and pressing... They're also completely disconnected from blanket cuts to NIH funding. There seems to be some kind of grasping for a positive in heavy cuts to essential research here. Put another way, there is zero selective pressure for 'less fraudulent' research to be cut. If anything, this applies selective pressure on publish or perish, false positive, press release style research. Harsh cuts in funding always penalise blue sky research, controversial work and anything that isn't guaranteed to bring press to the funding institution

I don't think your sweeping statements are true though, either? Every social endeavor, when allowed to grow without adequate pressure, becomes bloated, slow, and full of waste. This is almost universally true, and the exceptions tend to be things where there is heavy pressure to be lean. This pressure is more effective when it comes from within, but external pressure works, too.

If you want a process to remain efficient over time, it either needs to start that way and not change, or be aggressively pruned from time to time.

Academia should be pruning the waste and fraud itself, but is clearly not doing so aggressively enough.

I agree that the cuts, if naively applied, will cut both good research and bad. On the other hand, I think if academic research institutions are doing things naively, they're doing it wrong.

> This is absurdly reductive, and doesn't connect with the genuine issues at play incentivising good research and detecting fraud.

Of course it is! But the fact that academia seems to be utterly failing at performing even the most basic checks against fraud routinely. Of course a reductive approach is insufficient, but it would be better than the current status quo, which is to implicitly support the fraud by refusing to even look for it in the first place.

And it's honestly not any more reductive or incorrect than this:

> Harsh cuts in funding always penalise blue sky research, controversial work and anything that isn't guaranteed to bring press to the funding institution.