Cargo cult science

Cargo cult science is a phrase used to describe activities that look like scientific research, but aren't really scientific. It is a way of pretending to do science without actually doing it. For example, a group of people might pretend to conduct research by setting up a lab with all the appearance of a real lab, but never actually do any experiments or collect any data. They may pretend to publish results in fancy journals without actually doing any real work to back it up.