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Recent cases of scientific misconduct have raised alarms across the Harvard community. Yet the real issue at stake runs deeper than isolated breaches of integrity.

In 2021, a group of scientist-bloggers published a series of findings that would propel the discussion of scientific misconduct mainstream at Harvard. The researchers, alongside anonymous colleagues, alerted the University that the then-Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino had co-authored several research papers in which the data appeared to have been suspiciously entered and manipulated.

What has followed is a stubborn fight amid mounting evidence against the researcher. In 2023, Gino was placed on administrative leave and barred from campus. In 2025, her tenure was revoked, and her employment formally terminated. This past August, Harvard sued the former professor for defamation, citing her previous defense, which referenced evidence Harvard said was conjured “out of thin air.”

The Gino case, alongside the allegations of scientific misconduct against HMS neuroscientist Khaled Shah, should operate as a reminder that misconduct can persist at all levels of power in the absence of scrutiny. But we ought not view these situations through the lens of individual motive. Blatant cases of deliberate fraud are, in fact, rare; they exist as bad apples rather than part of an inherently flawed system of academics with poor incentives. Instead, it is much more important to consider the case in light of what came before: the rise of the metascientific process that made the misconduct visible in the first place.

Metascience, at its core, is the systematic study of how science is done. It aims to answer a variety of questions on how scientists should interpret and treat both evidence and the quest for scientific truth. For example, in the context of preclinical cancer biology, many drug targets appeared effective in early cell or mouse studies but failed to replicate when other labs tried to repeat the experiments. Metascience steps in to ask why. Were the original studies based on too few samples, were only the exciting positive results published, or do we need stronger practices — like sharing raw data or preregistering experiments — to better judge what findings are truly reliable?

Metascience has been around for decades. Organizations like the Center for Open Science have advocated for increased transparency in the research process, while other institutions like the Research on Research Institute apply the scientific method to study how research itself is conducted, funded, and managed.

Data Colada, the blog led by the team of researchers that was responsible for first drawing scrutiny to Gino’s findings, advocates for an analytical approach to published research, using quantitative analysis to examine the methods of particular papers and attempt to replicate their results. At Harvard, scholars across disciplines continue to contribute to University and national research initiatives on this topic, although primarily on an individual faculty or lab level.

It is this rise of metascience that remains the most important takeaway. A recent report found that more than 70 percent of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and over half have been unable to reproduce their own results. Given that published papers — of which Harvard is a leading producer — are the backbone for future scientific advancement, metascience is invaluable in guiding the work of future scientists, who could eventually impact the rest of society. So why aren’t we talking more about it?

While Harvard has established measures in place for the specific purpose of identifying research misconduct — including fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism — it has done relatively little as an institution to contribute to the discussion on metascience. But adding more red tape, for example, by making it more difficult for researchers to publish, is not the solution. The insurmountable pressure researchers face to publish their work is already burdensome and is appropriately framed as the “publish or perish” mentality.

Instead, several alternative measures are worth considering. On the one hand, it is worthwhile to evaluate how we can integrate metascientific inquiry — relevant across the social sciences and the hard sciences — into the classroom. Harvard could embed metascience into General Education Courses, ensuring that they reach as many students as possible. Meanwhile, labs could embed this philosophical thinking into their training, ensuring all members of a particular lab understand metascientific philosophy.

Harvard leads the world in science and in philosophizing on how to make the world a better place. It’s time to make metascience a bigger part of the conversation.

Ambika Grover ‘27, a Crimson Editorial Editor, is a joint concentrator in Molecular & Cellular Biology and Statistics in Leverett House and a student researcher in the Patel Lab.