Allegations of data fabrication have sparked the retraction of multiple papers from Ranga Dias, a researcher who claimed discovery of a room-temperature superconductor
See: Replication crisis
It’s a huge problem with modern science: effectively, only positive results move your career forward. Negative results get you nowhere, and critically, replicating other people’s work doesn’t either. So scientists have every incentive to stretch or bend the interpretation of their data.
Yep.
The only big complication with doing stuff that way is that if you get enough attention, abruptly people start looking at your stuff a lot harder.
And then you get shredded, and lose all credibility for the rest of your career.
Claiming to have discovered something absolutely ground breaking, that everyone in the field would want to replicate almost immediately, is exactly the kind of thing that would sink someone doing this.
But then again, people are idiots sometimes.