Take the litany of studies on puberty blockers and hormone therapy which claim a significant mental health benefit for youth suffering from gender dysphoria. Dr. Jack Turban, a psychiatrist and assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco, is perhaps the worst offender of pushing this trope in the US. He has published several papers on the topic of transgender youth, and has both misrepresented the conclusions of his own findings as well as those of other researchers on the topic. Some helpful breakdowns can be found here and here.

Three scholars, James A. Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian, sought to prove political bias in academic publishing by conducting their own experiment a few years ago. For the course of a year between 2017 and 2018, the group shopped twenty fake papers based on taking left-wing scholarship to its extremes to various high-profile journals. They managed to get seven of them published, including one paper that proposed replacing imperialist and sexist western astronomy with interpretative dance and another that suggested men who masturbate to the thought of a woman without her consent are participating in rape culture.

These stories have to make you wonder how much of modern academic inquiry consists of rigorous scholarship, and how much is a pure grift.