Science forms the bedrock of industrial innovation, and yet the integrity of the scientific enterprise has recently been questioned across multiple fields by high-profile scandals and replication crises. How common is scientific malpractice, and what are its costs for firms that rely on scientific research to guide their innovation investments? Using advanced AI and manual validation, we estimate the prevalence and different types of data malpractice in Alzheimer’s research, both within and across papers, from 1980 to 2020. We focus on inappropriate image duplications, an objectively observed form of data malpractice widespread in a field where experimental data are often presented as figures. Preliminary findings suggest that, on average, 1.7% of all peer-reviewed papers present inappropriately duplicated images, a number that has steadily increased over time. The incidence is greater for research done in universities (relative to corporate and clinical settings), employing animal and molecular methods (relative to human subject methods), and originating from China. Our current work investigates the costs of scientific malpractice for pharmaceutical firms that base their investments on publicly available science. By tracking citations from firm patents to papers with duplicated images, we plan to estimate how much attention and resources are distorted away from findings with clinical applications and how much this may contribute to explaining the slow progress in finding a cure for Alzheimer’s disease.…Read More