posted about 1 month ago
Not to sound unethical but are you sure that this guy is manipulating data? This is a serious allegation and your colleagues appear to have casually accepted it. Have they not had the same ethical conundrum? I also find it hard to believe that these people are just handing over data and are not asking questions about it changing. The others here are right on how to go about changing supervisor but are you making this decision on hearsay?
Again not to sound unethical but I think this is a lot more common than people think and something needs to be said about it. I have tried my utter best to replicate some high tier papers and cannot replicate their results. My results are always 10-15% lower and I have tried other papers that also have impossibly high figures. Fortunately my work is a novel combination of two different projects and such I don't have to compete directly with previous literature. However there is pressure on other researchers when publishing to be better than previous works, that may be fabricated, and causing ethical people to struggle. So once someone is unethical it is easier to also be unethical than to call out that first person.
If you are a early career researcher, in order to publish you have to compete with unethical people or perish. My supervisor has asked me to "polish" my data once or twice and I have flatly refused. Which in hindsight has made my PhD a bit more difficult as I have had to push the novelty of my work that bit harder instead of just being incremental. I honestly believe that a lot of "super star" researchers "polish" data, at least occasionally, because they always seem to get 1-2 high tier papers from every grant. Which is simply not possible as research is inherently risky.
Or this might just be me projecting my own insecurity about my lab skills at 11pm on Monday night.