Family member tried to do work relying on previous results from a biotech lab. Couldn’t do it. Tried to reproduce. Doesn’t work. Checked work carefully. Faked. Switched labs and research subject. Risky career move, but. Now has a career. Old lab is in mental black box. Never to be touched again.

Talked about it years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26125867

Others said they’d never seen it. So maybe it’s rare. But no one will tell you even if they encounter. Guaranteed career blackball.

For original research, a researcher is supposed to replicate studies that form the building blocks of their research. For example, if a drug is reported to increase expression of some mRNA in a cell, and your research derives from that, you will start by replicating that step, but it will just be a note in your introduction and not published as a finding on its own.

When a junior researcher, e.g. a grad student, fails to replicate a study, they assume it's technique. If they can't get it after many tries, they just move on, and try some other research approach. If they claim it's because the original study is flawed, people will just assume they don't have the skills to replicate it.

One of the problems is that science doesn't have great collaborative infrastructure. The only way to learn that nobody can reproduce a finding is to go to conferences and have informal chats with people about the paper. Or maybe if you're lucky there's an email list for people in your field where they routinely troubleshoot each other's technique. But most of the time there's just not enough time to waste chasing these things down.

I can't speak to whether people get blackballed. There's a lot of strong personalities in science, but mostly people are direct and efficient. You can ask pretty pointed questions in a session and get pretty direct answers. But accusing someone of fraud is a serious accusation and you probably don't want to get a reputation for being an accuser, FWIW.

I haven't identified an outright fake one but in my experience (mainly in sensor development) most papers are at the very least optimistic or are glossing over some major limitations in the approach. They should be treated as a source of ideas to try instead of counted on.

I've also seen the resistance that results from trying to investigate or even correct an issue in a key result of a paper. Even before it's published the barrier can be quite high (and I must admit that since it's not my primary focus and my name was not on it, I did not push as hard as I could have on it)

I've read of a few cases like this on Hacker News. There's often that assumption, sometimes unstated: if a junior scientist discovers clear evidence of academic misconduct by a senior scientist, it would be career suicide for the junior scientist to make their discovery public.

The replication crisis is largely particular to psychology, but I wonder about the scope of the don't rock the boat issue.