Beyond Duct Tape: Forensics, Fixes, and the Future of Science
A look back on (almost) a year of FoSci
Duct tape famously brought the Apollo 13 astronauts home alive – thanks to the team effort, including Commander Jim Lovell and engineer Ed Smylie. (Rest in peace, both.)
You don't build a mission on duct tape and hope. Strengthening science means fortifying the entire enterprise — from retractions to reviewers, metadata to media.
As I reflect on the first 18 FoSci blog posts, a clear throughline emerges: trust in science isn't just about emergency repairs. FoSci is the investigative understanding and inspection of the scientific ecosystem, calling out manipulations, and codifying trust.
The goal of this endeavor is to uphold science as a foundation of democracy. To accomplish this, we must explore both knowledge and manipulation of science — understanding how science works, identifying methods of manipulation and trusted research, and building out trust and knowledge in our rapidly changing world.
While a noble goal, ensuring science is a foundation of democracy needs to be further unpacked in order to make meaningful change. I break this down into a continuum from principles that offer philosophical reflections on knowledge, manipulation, and trust, to practices that provide real-world examples, anchoring our understanding of problems and solutions, and pathways that present solutions and strategies.
Below are short reflections on each post.
PRINCIPLES
These posts explore foundational ideas that shape how we think about trust in science – philosophical reflections, values, and frameworks. Pontification from ancient Rome to modern information warfare. From knowledge fidelity to research security. If you're looking for an overview of Forensic Scientometrics, you'll find an overview of FoSci and a reflection piece to get you started.
Ancient Lessons for Modern Science
Drawing from Roman traditions, I reflect on what science can learn from the breakdown of shared customs. It’s a call to action to defend the values—transparency, scrutiny, humility—that uphold the scientific enterprise.
Information Warfare – at the Library
Written in the aftermath of the British Library cyberattack, this post connects past book burnings to modern digital sabotage. Libraries remain frontlines in the fight for public knowledge.
—
Knowledge Fidelity
We need to think about research papers the way art historians think about paintings: provenance, properties, context. Libraries, in this vision, are no longer just vaults—they're the guardians of knowledge fidelity.
We Need to Talk About Research Security
This post introduces research security and explains how it differs from research integrity. It provides specific examples of how geopolitical agendas can subtly (or not so subtly) interfere with scientific ecosystems.
—
The Emerging Field of Forensic Scientometrics
This inaugural post makes the case for Forensic Scientometrics as a legitimate, necessary discipline. I lay out why we need a name and framework to describe the quiet work of those who uncover manipulation in the research ecosystem.
Reflections of 2024
This year-in-review post charts the rise of forensic scientometrics and the launch of FoSci itself. From Paris to Sydney, it reflects on what we’ve built—and where we’re going.
Bridging Principles to Practice
These posts move from thoughts into practical examples. Starting with some common myths of manipulation, repercussions of the people investigating dodgy works, to how AI will not save trusted science.
Science Manipulations: Myths and Truths
This post dismantles the myths I hear too often: that science will fix itself, that all scientists are noble, or that speaking up is paranoid. The more clearly we see the problems, the more power we have to intervene.
Fraud, Blackmail, and the Weaponization of Integrity
What happens when the tools we use to protect research integrity are weaponized? This post explores the fine line between exposing misconduct and turning transparency into extortion.
Trust is a Manual Override
AI won’t save us from research manipulation unless we feed it better ingredients. I follow one systematic review and trace the weak spots in the literature it draws from.
PRACTICES
These posts dig into the real-world mess of the research ecosystem—case studies, examples, and tools in action. Doctored images and questionable authorship. Journals appear to enable manipulation and how questionable articles slip into high-trust spaces. —
Doctored Knowledge
This post reveals how manipulated images slip past editorial systems and begin to pollute the scientific record. The real danger? AI systems are most likely training on this corrupted content.
What’s in a Name: Authorship
From co-authoring cats to fake academics, names on papers can paint a different picture of trust and manipulation, and humor. The piece digs into how authorship can be used to game legitimacy and why metadata alone isn't enough.
—
Vanity Journals, Conflicts of Interest, and the Quest for Research Integrity
This post examines how journals operating without editorial rigor facilitate citation games, reputational laundering, and policy distortion. A rare case where the authors themselves called out forced citations.
Research, Attention, and Manipulation
We investigate how research that shouldn’t be trusted by society still manages to infiltrate high-trust spaces like Wikipedia and news. Attention can be engineered - sometimes innocently, sometimes not.
Taking Practices to Pathways
These posts show how problems become patterns and how patterns point to solutions. We expose patterns hiding in plain sight by comparing author checks to a movie database and the cascading effect of bad metadata.
IMDB and Author Check
This post introduces the Author Check tool using a pop culture analogy—IMDb. It shows how network analysis can reveal patterns that traditional vetting often misses, especially when assessing potential collaborators.
The Domino Effect of Faulty Metadata
A single metadata error led to a retracted paper being falsely attributed to a public institution. I follow how that kind of contamination spreads across databases—and why provenance isn’t optional.
PATHWAYS
These posts are where we shift from diagnosis to repair. It’s one thing to document the problems in the system, but at some point, we need to build the path forward. From a revised taxonomy of retraction reasons to a map of how disinformation flows.
Error vs. Deception: Unpacking the 'Why' of Retractions (Part 1 and Part 2)
These posts walk through the updated taxonomy of retraction reasons and use real-world examples to show why understanding why a paper was retracted matters more than the label.
Combatting Truth Decay
This post introduces a taxonomy of disinformation to help us name and map the actors, methods, and outlets that degrade trust in science.
Each of these posts reflects a different angle of the same challenge: protecting science from erosion, distortion, and misuse. More than duct tape but less than silver bullets.
By its very nature, upholding science means upholding democracy – something the world needs more of right now.
Interested in taking a more active role in Forensic Scientometrics? We invite individuals working as researchers, sleuths, civil servants, journalists, metadata providers and publishing professional who support this declaration to add their signatures to the FoSci Paris Declaration, which can be found here.
 | A guest post by
|