Video recording, resources and tips from the CASW Connector Chat

On January 29, 2026, CASW Connector hosted a Chat with top investigative reporters Charles Piller of Science and Liza Gross of Inside Climate News.

The Chat was facilitated by CASW program director Amber Dance.

Below you’ll find a recording of the Chat, takeaways and tips from the presenters, and additional resources shared by attendees.

This tip sheet is a living document; to share additional resources, contact the CASW Connector team at connector@casw.org. And sign up for our newsletter to receive updates about future Connector Chats and resources for science writing.

Tip Sheet: How To Investigate the Misuse of Science, From Finding Fraud to Defending Your Work

By Liza Gross, Inside Climate News; author of The Science Writers’ Investigative Reporting Handbook
With additional material from Charles Piller, Science; author of Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s; winner of the 2025 Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting

Investigative reporting is challenging, time-consuming and often tedious work, but it’s vital to informing readers about matters of public importance. Below are general investigative reporting tips, as well as tips for investigating research fraud and misconduct.

General tips, things to consider before you start an investigation

Investigative reporting requires a higher burden of proof. Because investigative journalism seeks to uncover something of public interest that subjects often want to keep hidden, it requires not only rock-solid evidence, ideally from multiple sources, but also a higher bar of evidence, skepticism and effort to determine if, e.g., tipsters have hidden agendas, and for constant questioning of assumptions, reporting against your biases and pursuing every lead to avoid false conclusions.

Start with a focused question. Do enough prereporting to ensure it’s worth your time and effort to pursue. Formulate a clear question, or working hypothesis, that you can test and to guide your reporting. For example, when Liza discovered that California pesticide regulators wanted to raise allowable limits of the known carcinogen 1,3-D, she asked, why did the EPA lower the safety threshold for a pesticide known to cause cancer since the 1980s? The investigation revealed a textbook example of regulatory capture – when regulatory agencies serve the interests of the industries they’re supposed to regulate instead of serving the public interest.

Figure out what material you need to test your hypothesis and working assumptions (people, data, documents, site visits, potential federal and state records requests). If you feel like you’re spinning your wheels, step back and reevaluate your assumptions. Talk to trusted sources for insight and be ready to shift gears.

Working with confidential sources. If sources put you in touch with whistleblowers with inside information as you do your reporting, ensure that you can protect their identity through secure channels (encrypted emails, text messaging apps). Meet in person, if possible.

Be sure to clarify ground rules about “on background” and “off the record,” and consider allowing initial conversations to be off the record to establish trust.

Tips for investigating scientific misconduct and fraud

Do the hard work to understand the science. Read landmark papers and reviews in the field to get up to speed enough to discuss your understanding with experts who can confirm or correct what you think you know.

Stay organized. Charlie’s “Blots on a Field?” story involved more than 1,500 technical reports, scientific studies, spreadsheets, data files and interviews, among other source materials. Find a system that works for you to keep your materials organized and easy to search from the start. (See Google Pinpoint below.)

Identify a minimum and maximum story. In Charlie’s 2022 “Blots on a Field?” investigation about fabrication of data behind research on Simufilam — an investigational Alzheimer’s drug from Cassava Sciences — he knew that, at a minimum, he could describe the body of work whistleblower Matthew Schrag had compiled on questionable studies by Cassava-affiliated scientists. But as Charlie told the Association of Health Care Journalists, he thought he could produce a blockbuster report questioning some key research assumptions in Alzheimer’s disease — which he said his editors saw as well worth devoting months of reporting to. Toward that end, he painstakingly vetted Schrag’s expertise and reputation, sought out sources free of conflicts of interest that could taint their advice, and tried to interview everyone whose reputation and career might be harmed by the investigation’s findings.

As you do your reporting, write the nut graph your material supports. Keep writing nuts and supporting paragraphs until you feel you’ve proven your hypothesis.

Expect blowback. Investigative reporting is not for everyone. Remember why you think the issue is important to reveal to the public and be willing to be attacked for reporting your findings. Bulletproofing your story will help protect you from blowback from vindictive subjects and help shield you from legal liability. Develop a fact-checking system that can prove how you know what you’re reporting. Try to anticipate objections or attacks, and address them in the story.

Button down the facts. It’s essential to be as anal and meticulous in your fact-checking as possible. Come up with a system that works for you — e.g., either annotated on hard copy or digitally with footnotes — so you can always go to the original source and show how you know what you know. That will help ensure the accuracy of your reporting, help shield you from frivolous lawsuits (though it is no substitute for legal review) and help you defend against the blowback that may come from subjects of your investigation and their allies when they try to destroy your reputation and credibility.

It’s crucial to alert your editor in advance, if you can, about possible attacks that might emerge from people or organizations you are writing about. This is particularly important when writing about companies or corporations. Your news organization should indemnify you against lawsuits or legal threats (which can prove time-consuming and expensive, even if frivolous). If you are a freelancer, check with the publication about this, and consider taking out professional liability insurance.

“No surprises” email. Any investigation that accuses any person, company, government agency or other entity of wrongdoing must offer the subject of the investigation a fair right of reply, often called a “no surprises” letter or email. See a sample letter from a ProPublica reporter, with source documents used in the investigation, questions about the main findings, specific questions regarding conversations the subject was involved in and fact-checking questions.

Resources and tools

Organizing and digital security tools

  • Google Pinpoint is a research and organizational tool for exploring and analyzing large collections of documents. Google Pinpoint extracts text from uploaded files using OCR (optical character recognition) so you can upload and search hundreds of thousands of documents, images, emails, hand-written notes and audio files for specific words or phrases, locations, organizations and people.
  • Google Drive allows you to organize Google Documents for drafts, notes, audio files and interviews, and Google Sheets for data in nested folders. (Consider whether some source names and information should not be stored in any cloud storage system, and take precautions to ensure that your personal computers and storage devices are adequately protected. If you use online transcription services such as Otter, consider deleting all sensitive interview files from the system, saving the transcripts on your local drive.)
  • Digital security tips to protect yourself from online harassment and doxxing.
    • Use two-factor authentication (I use 1Password) and complex passwords for each account.
    • Secure your social media accounts, following steps to “deDox” yourself.

Scientific research databases

  • PubMed contains more than 39 million citations (and growing) for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals and online books.
  • PubMed Central is a free full-text archive of the biomedical and life sciences literature at the National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine.
  • Google Scholar allows you to search across disciplines; you can create a personal library on the site to save and organize papers for a specific search into folders. If an open-access PDF of a paper is available, it will appear to the right of the link. The Google Scholar extension allows you to search the Google Scholar database for full paper PDFs directly from your toolbar.
  • PubPeer, an online “journal club,” where scholars critique each other’s work as a check on the scientific record, was a primary tool in Charlie’s investigation. Student journalist Theo Baker also relied on PubPeer for a series that led to Stanford University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation. The Journalist’s Resource offers tips on using PubPeer. Never report claims made on PubPeer as fact without verifying their validity. That often means finding subject-matter experts who can review the materials to help you understand their importance or meaningfulness in the context of your story.
  • Retraction Watch tracks retractions “as a window into the scientific process.” It maintains a searchable database of restricted scientific papers, with notes on how it was created. It also maintains a list of “hijacked journals” that “mimic legitimate journals by adopting their titles, ISSNs, and other metadata.” These journals typically mirror legitimate journals without permission from the original journal, while cutting corners (ignoring manuscript quality and even ignoring subject matter) to make money publishing more papers.
  • NIH RePORTER offers a terrific, flexible search tool for tracking science/health-related grants from the National Institutes of Health, the top funder of biomedical research.
  • For following the money as it pertains to publicly traded companies, SEC Info is a fantastic, flexible search tool.

Books and organizations to support investigative reporting

  • The Science Writers’ Investigative Reporting Handbook, a beginner’s guide to investigative reporting, with an expanded edition coming next year from University of Chicago Press.
  • The Investigative Reporter’s Handbook, the bible for investigative reporting of any subject.
  • International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a Washington, D.C.-based global network of more than 290 investigative journalists in more than 100 countries who collaborate on in-depth investigative stories.
    • ICIJ curates a database on medical devices with more than 120,000 recalls, safety alerts and field safety notices of medical devices and their connections with manufacturers.
    • ICIJ also maintains Datashare, an open-source document research platform.
  • Investigative Reporters and Editors, a grassroots nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the quality of investigative reporting. Its acronym, IRE, encapsulates the outrage at wrongdoing that motivates many investigative journalists. The $75 annual membership fee is well worth gaining access to thousands of reporting tipsheets and resources, conferences and training workshops. IRE’s National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR) programming, including a conference and bootcamps, are essential for those interested in learning data skills.
  • Committee to Protect Journalists provides emergency financial and nonfinancial support to journalists whose safety is at risk.
  • The Fund for Investigative Journalism offers grants for up to $10,000 for investigative projects.

Legal resources