When Nature features editor Richard Van Noorden published a 2023 story on serious flaws in many medical trials, he was surprised by the reaction of some readers. In a letter to the editor, one reader called Van Noorden’s reporting “sensationalistic and potentially offensive to medical authors.” Others emailed him to ask whether the story—which covered problems in academic studies—also cast doubt on pharmaceutical industry drug trials.
“I hadn’t considered that it could be read in that way,” Van Noorden says—partly because the piece pointed to specific areas of research, such as anesthesiology and women’s health, and work from countries that aren’t major players in global medical research. The misreading or misuse of reporting on flaws in science has parallels with the way genetics research can be abused by white supremacists, he says.
Science journalism that reports on issues of scientific integrity—including fabricated data, evidence of shady statistics, and problematic publishing practices—is operating in a fraught environment. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has made huge cuts to science funding, terminated the jobs of hundreds of thousands of federal scientists across different agencies, and removed public data on climate and health from government websites, says Jules Barbati-Dajches, an analyst for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Although a majority of people globally still report trusting science, research has found that trust in science has decreased in Africa and South America since the COVID-19 pandemic, while polling from the Pew Research Center reports that U.S. Americans’ confidence in scientists has fallen slightly in recent years.
Scandals of scientific misconduct and resulting media coverage have been invoked as harming public trust in science. The sleuths who hunt down flaws and fraud in science are concerned that their work is being weaponized to argue that all of science is untrustworthy. And poor public understanding of the scientific process exacerbates the risk of this work being misunderstood, says freelance science reporter Jackson Ryan, who has covered systemic failures in misconduct investigations at Australian universities. “If you write about a doctor who has been abusing children, we don’t suddenly stop trusting doctors,” he says. But “people don’t actually understand how evidence accrues. And so, when you tell them, ‘Hey, this bad thing happened in science,’ they just think that science as a whole is not working.”
Journalism plays a critical role in protecting the public interest, which includes shining a light on fake or flawed science that could cause harm or that wastes resources—often taxpayer money. Even in a political climate where reporters’ work might be weaponized or twisted, “the need for good reporting doesn’t fundamentally change,” Van Noorden says. Reporters covering scientific integrity can’t control narratives spun from their stories once they publish, but they can take care in their reporting to reduce the risk of stoking mistrust.
Go Back to Basics
The principles that underlie all good journalism are critical for watchdog reporters, says El País science journalist Manuel Ansede, who has covered scientific misconduct in Spain, including a 2024 investigation that revealed internal emails from the rector of the University of Salamanca requiring collaborators to cite high numbers of his papers. If the reporting is sound and not sensationalist, “it simply provides complete, contextualized information that readers need,” he says.
Preventing your work from stirring up unnecessary mistrust includes making careful decisions about when a story is solid and important enough to cover. Watchdog reporters should treat claims about problems in science with the same scrutiny they would apply to any other claim, says Joe Bak-Coleman, a computational social scientist at the University of Washington who spent two years as a researcher at the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security. For example, if a claim comes from sleuths who bring their keen researchers’ eye to others’ work, ask them what made them inspect a certain section of the literature. Sometimes, trawling small subsections of literature results in a “street light effect,” says Bak-Coleman, that might make fishy behavior appear more widespread.
It’s critical not to think that multiple examples on their own can illustrate a wider problem.
If a claim warrants further investigation, it’s worth anticipating how readers might misread it and prebunking accordingly. Van Noorden suggests asking sources who uncover issues in science whether their findings suggest that the field as a whole can’t be trusted, or how they would react to people making a political point that science is untrustworthy.
Reporters can also turn to external sources to see if claims of flaws or fabrication hold water, says The Chronicle of Higher Education senior writer Stephanie M. Lee. For instance, when faced with a claim that images have been doctored in a paper, reporters should reach out to people who specialize in image manipulation to see whether they agree that the evidence of wrongdoing is strong, she says.
Digging up primary sources—such as correspondence between people working in a lab—can also ensure that a story is grounded in strong evidence. In a 2018 story for BuzzFeed News that showed how disgraced Cornell food psychology researcher Brian Wansink would “knead” data from his lab to produce flashy findings, Lee used public records requests to obtain emails between Wansink and his collaborators at other universities to illuminate the inner workings of the lab. To make sense of what she read, Lee took her findings to statistical experts to understand whether Wansink’s behavior was as problematic as it seemed.
Frame Stories Carefully
To guard against misreading or weaponization of their work, reporters should take care in how they frame a story about failings in science, not blowing the problem out of proportion to the evidence.
It’s critical not to think that multiple examples on their own can illustrate a wider problem. Journalists can too easily fall into the trap of thinking, “Here’s three things, ta-da! A trend,” which can be dangerous in this area, Van Noorden says. Multiple examples are “just anecdata”—finding actual data can better help to contextualize how big a problem is.
Pointing to efforts by the scientific community to fix systemic issues can help to contextualize wrongdoing as part of a wider system that strives for self-correction.
For example, in a 2023 Nature story about increasing rates of retraction of scientific papers, Van Noorden used scientific publishing data to show how outfits that churn out fake papers and arrange peer review fraud have led to dramatic rises in the number of papers withdrawn by journals—more than 10,000 in 2023. But he also noted that retractions made up only around 0.2 percent of the total number of publications in 2022. Even if ten times the number of papers should actually be retracted, this would still leave the vast majority of science intact, he says. “Science needs to be made more rigorous, but at the same time this is not a disaster … the vast majority of labs are doing good, important and responsible work and pushing forward the frontiers of science.”
Reporters should also be careful about extrapolating a problem in a given field to all of science, says Bak-Coleman. Narrower terms that are specific about which field is in question, such as “psychology” or “Alzheimer’s research,” are more precise and don’t generalize beyond the evidence. “Is ‘science’ the right word?” he says. “Or is there a more precise way of describing the phenomenon?”
Pointing to efforts by the scientific community to fix systemic issues can help to contextualize wrongdoing as part of a wider system that strives for self-correction. After allegations broke of fabricated data in the work of behavioral ecologist Jonathan Pruitt, multiple outlets covered a coordinated response from many other researchers in the field, who collaborated to root out problematic papers. “There’s often room to do some solutions journalism,” says Alice Fleerackers, assistant professor of journalism and civic engagement at the University of Amsterdam. Reporters could also note more sweeping efforts to improve science, she says, such as initiatives aiming to stop universities from assessing researchers purely based on statistics like how much their work is cited.
Understand Your Audience
It’s critical for journalists to understand the motivations behind mistrust and the different forms that it can take. By narrowing in on the why, journalists can assess how their audience might misinterpret claims, or how bad actors might misrepresent coverage. Talking to social scientists and other experts can be helpful to make sense of these drivers, says freelance science journalist Dyna Rochmyaningsih. “Social science really gives you wider and richer context.”
In Indonesia, for example, the government tends to be suspicious of international research collaborations, considering it a kind of foreign interference, Rochmyaningsih says. So, when she reported a 2020 Science story on a French ecologist deported from Indonesia after living and working in the country for 15 years, Rochmyaningsih interviewed a legal scholar to understand how this deportation fit into a larger picture.
The most a reporter covering thorny issues in science can do is provide a well-reported, fair, and nuanced look at the issue at hand.
When adding a few extra lines of context could potentially stave off misuse, it’s worth sacrificing brevity to do so. In her 2025 National Geographic story about the repatriation of the remains of Homo erectus “Java man” from the Netherlands, for example, Rochmyaningsih addressed the nuances of decolonization of science in Indonesia, where the fossil originated, as well as the evolution of thinking on repatriation in the Netherlands. By digging deeper into this complex issue, she hoped to make it more difficult for politicians and nationalists to use the story to cast suspicion on international collaborations, she says.
Even as journalists cover the flaws in a field, they can still show that they take the concerns of their audience seriously, says Theo Ruprecht, a freelance journalist who co-created and co-hosts the Brazilian podcast Ciência Suja, or “Dirty Science.” In a 2021 episode about the anti-vax movement that covered teenagers experiencing adverse effects after receiving the HPV vaccine, Ruprecht’s team did a deep dive into the worries of the teenagers and their families, the shoddy science claiming to show safety concerns with the vaccine, and the evidence indicating that the vaccine was safe. “We try to take a look at people and say, look, it’s a genuine question that you have. It’s not that you’re dumb,” he says.
Of course, journalists don’t have any say in how their stories take flight after publication. It’s frustrating for reporters when they don’t agree with how their stories are read or used, says Lee—but ultimately, interpretation is “kind of up to the public.”
The most a reporter covering thorny issues in science can do is provide a well-reported, fair, and nuanced look at the issue at hand. Always get the full story, Ansede says, including the perspective of the alleged wrongdoer. Then, trust that your work speaks for itself. “A well-crafted news story only helps readers build their own informed opinion.”
Cathleen O’Grady is a freelance science journalist. She is a contributing correspondent at Science, where she covers scientific integrity, metascience, and science policy, as well as behavioral and life sciences. Her work on the use and abuse of evidence in societal decision-making has appeared in The Atlantic, Hakai, and National Geographic, among others. Follow her on Bluesky.