[anjc]

I did just mean AI and Computer Science per OP. By "head of steam" I mean to say that much research is built on it, think the likes of "Attention is All you Need". There isn't quite an equivalent of this in public policy in my experience.

Conversely, computer science/AI doesn't have an equivalent of the rigor that public policy research tends to go through. CS has e.g., benchmark datasets, typical evaluation metrics, but these are more like norms rather than requirements, whereas in public policy, instruments for validations are far more rigorously tested and enforced. Depending on the area.

I agree that outright fraud would be detrimental, but I think OP overblows this issue completely and should apologise to his co-authors.