Scientific misconduct - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Scientific misconduct
Misconduct
A misconduct is a legal term meaning a wrongful, improper, or unlawful conduct motivated by premeditated or intentional purpose or by obstinate indifference to the consequences of one's acts....

is the violation of the standard codes of scholarly conduct

Scholarly method

Scholarly method or scholarship is the body of principles and practices used by scholars to make their claims about the world as valid and trustworthy as possible, and to make them known to the scholarly public.-Methods:...

and ethical behavior

Ethics

Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...

in professional

Professional

A professional is a person who is paid to undertake a specialised set of tasks and to complete them for a fee. The traditional professions were doctors, lawyers, clergymen, and commissioned military officers. Today, the term is applied to estate agents, surveyors , environmental scientists,...

scientific research

Science

Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...

. A Lancet
The Lancet
The Lancet is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal. It is one of the world's best known, oldest, and most respected general medical journals...

review on Handling of Scientific Misconduct in Scandinavian countries provides the following sample definitions: (reproduced in The COPE report 1999)

Danish definition: "Intention or gross negligence leading to fabrication of the scientific message or a false credit or emphasis given to a scientist"

Swedish definition: "Intention[al] distortion of the research process by fabrication of data, text, hypothesis, or methods from another researcher's manuscript form or publication; or distortion of the research process in other ways."

The consequences of scientific misconduct can be severe at a personal level for both perpetrators and any individual who exposes it. In addition there are public health implications attached to the promotion of medical or other interventions based on dubious research findings.

Motivation to commit scientific misconduct

According to David Goodstein

David Goodstein

David L. Goodstein is a U.S. physicist and educator. From 1988 to 2007 he served as Vice-provost of the California Institute of Technology , where he is also a professor of physics and applied physics, as well as the Frank J...

of Caltech, there are motivators for scientists to commit misconduct, which are briefly summarised here.
Career pressure

Science is still a very strongly career-driven discipline. Scientists depend on a good reputation

Reputation

Reputation of a social entity is an opinion about that entity, typically a result of social evaluation on a set of criteria...

to receive ongoing support and funding

Funding

Funding is the act of providing resources, usually in form of money , or other values such as effort or time , for a project, a person, a business or any other private or public institutions...

; and a good reputation relies largely on the publication of high-profile scientific papers. Hence, there is a strong imperative to "publish or perish

Publish or perish

"Publish or perish" is a phrase coined to describe the pressure in academia to publish work constantly to further or sustain one's career.Frequent publication is one of the few methods at a scholar's disposal to demonstrate their academic capabilities, and the attention that successful publications...

". Clearly, this may motivate desperate (or fame-hungry) scientists to fabricate results.

To this category may also be added a paranoia

Paranoia

Paranoia [] is a thought process believed to be heavily influenced by anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality and delusion. Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs, or beliefs of conspiracy concerning a perceived threat towards oneself...

that there are other scientists out there who are close to success in the same experiment, which puts extra pressure on being the first one. It is suggested as a cause of the fraud of Hwang Woo-Suk. A main source of detection comes when other research teams in fact fail or get different results.

Laziness

Even on the rare occasions when scientists do falsify data, they almost never do so with the active intent to introduce false information into the body of scientific knowledge. Rather, they intend to introduce a fact that they believe is true, without going to the trouble and difficulty of actually performing the experiments required.

Ease of fabrication

In many scientific fields, results are often difficult to reproduce accurately, being obscured by noise

Noise

In common use, the word noise means any unwanted sound. In both analog and digital electronics, noise is random unwanted perturbation to a wanted signal; it is called noise as a generalisation of the acoustic noise heard when listening to a weak radio transmission with significant electrical noise...

, artifacts, and other extraneous data

Data

The term data refers to qualitative or quantitative attributes of a variable or set of variables. Data are typically the results of measurements and can be the basis of graphs, images, or observations of a set of variables. Data are often viewed as the lowest level of abstraction from which...

. That means that even if a scientist does falsify data, he can expect to get away with it – or at least claim innocence if his results conflict with others in the same field. There are no “scientific police” who are trained to fight scientific crimes; all investigations are made by experts in science but amateurs in dealing with criminals. It is relatively easy to cheat although difficult to know exactly how many scientists fabricate data.

Forms of scientific misconduct

Forms of scientific misconduct include:

fabrication
Fabrication (science)
Fabrication, in the context of scientific inquiry and academic research, refers to the act of intentionally falsifying research results, such as reported in a journal article. Fabrication is considered a form of scientific misconduct, and is regarded as highly unethical...

– the publication of deliberately false or misleading research, often subdivided into:
- Obfuscation
  Obfuscation
  Obfuscation is the hiding of intended meaning in communication, making communication confusing, wilfully ambiguous, and harder to interpret.- Background :Obfuscation may be used for many purposes...
  
  – the omission of critical data or results. Example: Only reporting positive outcomes and not adverse outcomes.
- Fabrication – the actual making up of research data and (the intent of) publishing them, sometimes referred to as "drylabbing".
- Falsification – manipulation of research data and processes in order to reflect or prevent a certain result.
- bare assertions – making entirely unsubstantiated claims

Another form of fabrication is where references are included to give arguments the appearance of widespread acceptance, but are actually fake, and/or do not support the argument.

plagiarism
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...

– the act of taking credit (or attempting to take credit) for the work of another. A subset is citation plagiarism – willful or negligent failure to appropriately credit other or prior discoverers, so as to give an improper impression of priority. This is also known as, "citation amnesia", the "disregard syndrome" and "bibliographic negligence". Arguably, this is the most common type of scientific misconduct. Sometimes it is difficult to guess whether authors intentionally ignored a highly relevant cite or lacked knowledge of the prior work. Discovery credit can also be inadvertently reassigned from the original discoverer to a better-known researcher. This is a special case of the Matthew effect
Matthew effect (sociology)
In sociology, the Matthew effect is the phenomenon where "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer". Those who possess power and economic or social capital can leverage those resources to gain more power or capital. The term was first coined by sociologist Robert K...

.
self-plagiarism – or multiple publication
Multiple publication
Duplicate publication, multiple publication, or redundant publication refers to publishing the same intellectual material more than once, by the author or publisher...

of the same content with different titles and/or in different journals is sometimes also considered misconduct; scientific journal
Scientific journal
In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication intended to further the progress of science, usually by reporting new research. There are thousands of scientific journals in publication, and many more have been published at various points in the past...

s explicitly ask authors not to do this. It is referred to as "salami" (i.e. many identical slices) in the jargon of medical journal editors (MJE). According to some MJE this includes publishing the same article in a different language.
the violation of ethical
Ethics
Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...

standards regarding human
Human
Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...

and animal
Animal
Animals are a major group of multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia or Metazoa. Their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later on in their life. Most animals are motile, meaning they can move spontaneously and...

experiment
Experiment
An experiment is a methodical procedure carried out with the goal of verifying, falsifying, or establishing the validity of a hypothesis. Experiments vary greatly in their goal and scale, but always rely on repeatable procedure and logical analysis of the results...

s – such as the standard that a human subject of the experiment must give informed consent
Informed consent
Informed consent is a phrase often used in law to indicate that the consent a person gives meets certain minimum standards. As a literal matter, in the absence of fraud, it is redundant. An informed consent can be said to have been given based upon a clear appreciation and understanding of the...

to the experiment.
ghostwriting
Ghostwriter
A ghostwriter is a professional writer who is paid to write books, articles, stories, reports, or other texts that are officially credited to another person. Celebrities, executives, and political leaders often hire ghostwriters to draft or edit autobiographies, magazine articles, or other written...

– the phenomenon where someone other than the named author(s) makes a major contribution. Typically, this is done to mask contributions from drug companies. It incorporates plagiarism and has an additional element of financial fraud.
Conversely, research misconduct is not limited to NOT listing authorship, but also includes the conferring authorship on those that have not made substantial contributions to the research. This is done by senior researchers who muscle their way onto the papers of inexperienced junior researchers as well as others that stack authorship in an effort to guarantee publication. This is much harder to prove due to a lack of consistency in defining "authorship" or "substantial contribution".
strategic placement of self-citations to inflate bibliometric indicators, such as the H-index
H-index
The h-index is an index that attempts to measure both the productivity and impact of the published work of a scientist or scholar. The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications...

.
Misappropriation of data – Literally stealing the work and results of others and publishing as to make it appear the author had performed all the work under which the data was obtained.

In addition, some academics consider suppression—the failure to publish significant findings due to the results being adverse to the interests of the researcher or his/her sponsor(s)—to be a form of misconduct as well; this is discussed below.

In some cases, scientific misconduct may also constitute violations of the law, but not always. Being accused of the activities described in this article is a serious matter for a practicing scientist, with severe consequences should it be determined that a researcher intentionally or carelessly engaged in misconduct.

Three percent of the 3,475 research institutions that report to the US Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Research Integrity, indicate some form of scientific misconduct. (Source: Wired Magazine, March 2004) However the ORI will only investigate allegations of impropriety where research was funded by federal grants. They routinely monitor such research publication for red flags.

Other private organizations like the Committee of Medical Journal Editors (COJE) can only police their own members.

The validity of the methods and results of scientific papers are often scrutinized in journal club

Journal club

A journal club is a group of individuals who meet regularly to critically evaluate recent articles in scientific literature. Journal clubs are usually organized around a defined subject in basic or applied research. For example, the application of evidence-based medicine to some area of medical...

s. In this venue, members can decide amongst themselves with the help of peers if a scientific paper's ethical standards are met.

The U.S. National Science Foundation

National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...

defines three types of research misconduct: fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. Fabrication is making up results and recording or reporting them. Falsification is manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes or changing or omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the research record. Plagiarism is the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit.

Responsibility of authors and of coauthors

Authors and coauthors of scientific publications have a variety of responsibilities. Contravention of the rules of scientific authorship may lead to a charge of scientific misconduct. All authors, including coauthors, are expected to have made reasonable attempts to check findings submitted to academic journals for publication.
Simultaneous submission of scientific findings to more than one journal or duplicate publication of findings is usually regarded as misconduct, under what is known as the Ingelfinger rule, named after the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine

New England Journal of Medicine

The New England Journal of Medicine is an English-language peer-reviewed medical journal published by the Massachusetts Medical Society. It describes itself as the oldest continuously published medical journal in the world.-History:...

1967-1977, Franz Ingelfinger.

Guest authorship (where there is stated authorship in the absence of involvement, also known as gift authorship) and ghost authorship (where the real author is not listed as an author) are commonly regarded as forms of research misconduct. In some cases coauthors of faked research have been accused of inappropriate behavior or research misconduct for failing to verify reports authored by others or by a commercial sponsor. Examples include the case of Gerald Schatten

Gerald Schatten

Gerald Schatten is an American stem cell researcher with interests in cell, developmental, and reproductive biology. He is Professor and Vice-Chair of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences and Professor of Cell Biology and Physiology at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is also...

who co-authored with Hwang Woo-Suk

Hwang Woo-Suk

Hwang Woo-suk is a South Korean veterinarian and researcher. He was a professor of theriogenology and biotechnology at Seoul National University who became infamous for fabricating a series of experiments, which appeared in high-profile journals, in the field of stem cell research...

, the case of Professor Geoffrey Chamberlain named as guest author of papers fabricated by Malcolm Pearce, (Chamberlain was exonerated from collusion in Pearce's deception) - and the coauthors with Jan Hendrik Schön

Jan Hendrik Schön

The Schön scandal concerns German physicist Jan Hendrik Schön who briefly rose to prominence after a series of apparent breakthroughs with semiconductors that were later discovered to be fraudulent...

at Bell Laboratories. More recent cases include that of Charles Nemeroff, then the editor-in-chief of Neuropsychopharmacology, and a well-documented case involving the drug Actonel.

Authors are expected to keep all study data for later examination even after publication. The failure to keep data may be regarded as misconduct. Some scientific journals require that authors provide information to allow readers to determine whether the authors might have commercial or non-commercial conflicts of interest. Authors are also commonly required to provide information about ethical aspects of research, particularly where research involves human or animal participants or use of biological material. Provision of incorrect information to journals may be regarded as misconduct. Financial pressures on universities have encouraged this type of misconduct. The majority of recent cases of alleged misconduct involving undisclosed conflicts of interest or failure of the authors to have seen scientific data involve collaborative research between scientists and biotechnology companies (Nemeroff, Blumsohn).

Responsibilities of research institutions

In many countries there is no regulator to oversee the investigation of allegations of research misconduct. For example in the UK, unlike the United States, even acquisition of funds on the basis of fraudulent data is not a legal offence. Universities therefore have no incentive and every disincentive to investigate allegations or act on the findings of such investigations if they vindicate the allegation. In one notable example, King's College (London) performed an internal investigation which showed research findings from one of their researchers to be 'at best unreliable, and in many cases spurious'. King's College took no action in terms of retracting relevant published research, or preventing further episodes from occurring. It was only 10 years later, when an entirely separate form of misconduct by the same individual was being investigated by the General Medical Council

General Medical Council

The General Medical Council registers and regulates doctors practising in the United Kingdom. It has the power to revoke or restrict a doctor's registration if it deems them unfit to practise...

, that the internal report came to light.

This case and another suggest that the execution of scientific misconduct should not be simply considered as an individual acting alone. In both these cases senior academics supported an individual engaging in scientific misconduct. The role of the institution in tolerating and supporting scientific misconduct has probably been underestimated.

Responsibilities of scientific colleagues who are "bystanders"

Some academics believe that scientific colleagues who suspect scientific misconduct should consider taking informal action themselves, or reporting their concerns. (See Gerald Koocher and Patricia Keith Speigel in NATURE Vol 466 22 July 2010: Peers Nip Misconduct in the Bud, and (with Joan Sieber) Responding to Research Wrongdoing: A User Friendly Guide, July 2010.) This question is of great importance since much research suggests that it is very difficult for people to act or come forward when they see unacceptable behavior, unless they have help from their organizations. A "User-friendly Guide," and the existence of a confidential organizational ombudsman

Organizational ombudsman

An organizational ombudsman is a designated neutral or impartial dispute resolution practitioner whose major function is to provide independent, impartial, confidential and informal assistance to managers and employees, clients and/or other stakeholders of a corporation, university,...

may help people who are uncertain about what to do, or afraid of bad consequences for their speaking up. (See Mary Rowe, Linda Wilcox and Howard Gadlin, Dealing with—or Reporting—“Unacceptable” Behavior—with additional thoughts about the “Bystander Effect,” in JIOA, vol.2, no.1, pp52–62.)

Photo manipulation

In 2006, the Journal of Cell Biology gained publicity for instituting tests to detect photo manipulation in papers that were being considered for publication. This was in response to the increased usage of programs by scientists such as Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems Incorporated.Adobe's 2003 "Creative Suite" rebranding led to Adobe Photoshop 8's renaming to Adobe Photoshop CS. Thus, Adobe Photoshop CS5 is the 12th major release of Adobe Photoshop...

, which facilitate photo manipulation. Since then more publishers, including the Nature Publishing Group

Nature Publishing Group

Nature Publishing Group is an international publishing company that publishes academic journals, online databases, and services across the life, physical, chemical and applied sciences and clinical medicine...

, have instituted similar tests and require authors to minimize and specify the extent of photo manipulation when a manuscript is submitted for publication

Although the type of manipulation that is allowed can depend greatly on the type of experiment that is presented and also differ from one journal to another, in general the following manipulations are not allowed:

splicing together different images to represent a single experiment
changing brightness
Brightness
Brightness is an attribute of visual perception in which a source appears to be radiating or reflecting light. In other words, brightness is the perception elicited by the luminance of a visual target...

and contrast
Contrast (vision)
Contrast is the difference in visual properties that makes an object distinguishable from other objects and the background. In visual perception of the real world, contrast is determined by the difference in the color and brightness of the object and other objects within the same field of view...

of only a part of the image
any change that conceals information, even when it is considered to be aspecific, which includes:
- changing brightness and contrast to leave only the most intense signal
- using clone tool
  Clone tool
  The clone tool, as it is known in Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, and Corel PhotoPaint, is used in digital image editing to replace information for one part of a picture with information from another part...
  
  s to hide information
showing only a very small part of the photograph so that additional information is not visible

And more in general, most journals nowadays urge authors to use photo manipulation with restraint and great care.

Suppression/non-publication of data

A related issue concerns the deliberate suppression, failure to publish, or selective release of the findings of scientific studies. Such cases may not be strictly definable as scientific misconduct as the deliberate falsification of results is not present. However, in such cases the intent may nevertheless be to deliberately deceive. Studies may be suppressed or remain unpublished because the findings are perceived to undermine the commercial, political or other interests of the sponsoring agent or because they fail to support the ideological goals of the researcher. Examples include the failure to publish studies if they demonstrate the harm of a new drug, or truthfully publishing the benefits of a treatment while omitting harmful side-effects.

This is distinguishable from other concepts such as bad science, junk science

Junk science

Junk science is a term used in U.S. political and legal disputes that brands an advocate's claims about scientific data, research, or analyses as spurious. The term may convey a pejorative connotation that the advocate is driven by political, ideological, financial, or other unscientific...

or pseudoscience

Pseudoscience

Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice which is presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to a valid scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status...

where the criticism centres on the methodology or underlying assumptions. It may be possible in some cases to use statistical methods to show that the datasets offered in relation to a given field are incomplete. However this may simply reflect the existence of real-world restrictions on researchers without justifying more sinister conclusions.

Some cases go beyond the failure to publish complete reports of all findings with researchers knowingly making false claims based on falsified data. This falls clearly under the definition of scientific misconduct, even if the result was achieved by suppressing data. In the case of Raphael B. Stricker, M.D., for instance, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity

United States Office of Research Integrity

The Office of Research Integrity is one of the bodies concerned with research integrity in the United States. It was created when the Office of Scientific Integrity in the National Institutes of Health and the Office of Scientific Integrity Review in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for...

has found the removal of samples from a data set

Data set

A data set is a collection of data, usually presented in tabular form. Each column represents a particular variable. Each row corresponds to a given member of the data set in question. Its values for each of the variables, such as height and weight of an object or values of random numbers. Each...

in order to reach a desired conclusion to be grounds for disbarment from funding.

Consequences for science

The consequences of scientific fraud vary based on the severity of the fraud, the level of notice it receives, and how long it goes undetected. For cases of fabricated evidence, the consequences can be wide ranging, with others working to confirm (or refute) the false finding, or with research agendas being distorted to address the fraudulent evidence. The Piltdown Man

Piltdown Man

The Piltdown Man was a hoax in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human. These fragments consisted of parts of a skull and jawbone, said to have been collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown, East Sussex, England...

fraud is a case in point: The significance of the bona-fide fossils' being found was muted for decades because they disagreed with Piltdown Man and the pre-conceived notions that those faked fossils supported. In addition, the prominent paleontologist Arthur Smith Woodward

Arthur Smith Woodward

Sir Arthur Smith Woodward was an English palaeontologist.-Biography:Woodward was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire, England and was educated there and at Owens College, Manchester. He joined the staff of the Department of Geology at the Natural History Museum in 1882. He became assistant Keeper of...

spent time at Piltdown each year until he died trying to find more Piltdown Man remains. The misdirection of resources kept others from taking the real fossils more seriously and delayed the reaching of a correct understanding of human evolution. (The Taung Child

Taung Child

The Taung Child — or Taung Baby — is the fossilized skull of a young Australopithecus africanus individual. It was discovered in 1924 by quarrymen working for the Northern Lime Company in Taung, South Africa...

, which should have been the death knell for the view that the human brain evolved first, was instead treated very critically because of its disagreement with the Piltdown Man evidence.)

In the case of Dr Alfred Steinschneider, two decades and tens of millions of research dollars were lost trying to find the elusive link between infant sleep apnea, that Steinschneider said he had observed and recorded in his laboratory and claimed was a precursor of sudden infant death syndrome

Sudden infant death syndrome

Sudden infant death syndrome is marked by the sudden death of an infant that is unexpected by medical history, and remains unexplained after a thorough forensic autopsy and a detailed death scene investigation. An infant is at the highest risk for SIDS during sleep, which is why it is sometimes...

(SIDS). The cover was blown in 1994, 22 years after Steinschneider's 1972 Pediatrics

Pediatrics (journal)

Pediatrics is an official peer-reviewed journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. In the inaugural January 1948 issue, the journal's first editor, Hugh McCulloch, articulated the journal's vision: "The content of the journal is... intended to encompass the needs of the whole child in his...

paper claiming such an association, when Waneta Hoyt, the mother of the patients in the paper, was arrested, indicted and convicted on 5 counts of second degree manslaughter for the smothering deaths of her five children. While that in itself was bad enough, the paper, presumably written as an attempt in trying to save infants' lives, ironically was ultimately used as a defense in cases where parents were suspected in multiple deaths of their own children in cases of Münchausen syndrome by proxy

Munchausen syndrome by proxy

Münchausen syndrome by proxy is a label for a pattern of behavior in which care-givers deliberately exaggerate, fabricate, and/or induce physical, psychological, behavioral, and/or mental health problems in others. Other experts classified MSbP as a mental illness...

. The 1972 Pediatrics' paper was cited by 404 papers in the interim and is still listed on Pubmed without comment.

Consequences for those who expose misconduct

The potentially severe consequences for individuals who are found to have engaged in misconduct also reflect on the institutions that host or employ them and also on the participants in any peer review process that has allowed the publication of questionable research. This means that a range of actors in any case may have a motivation to suppress any evidence or suggestion of misconduct. Persons who expose such cases, commonly called whistleblower

Whistleblower

A whistleblower is a person who tells the public or someone in authority about alleged dishonest or illegal activities occurring in a government department, a public or private organization, or a company...

s, can find themselves open to retaliation by a number of different means. These negative consequences for exposers of misconduct have driven the development of whistle blowers charters - designed to protect those who raise concerns. A whistleblower is almost always alone in his fight - his career becomes completely dependent on the decision about alleged misconduct. If the accusations prove false, his career is completely destroyed, but even in case of positive decision the career of the whistleblower can be under question: his reputation of "troublemaker" will prevent many employers from hiring him. There is no international body where a whistleblower could give his concerns. If a university fails to investigate suspected fraud or provides a fake investigation to save their reputation the whistleblower has no right of appeal. High profile journals like Nature
Nature (journal)
Nature, first published on 4 November 1869, is ranked the world's most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports...

and Science
Science (journal)
Science is the academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is one of the world's top scientific journals....

usually forward all allegations to the university where the authors are employed, or may do nothing at all.

Exposure of falsified data

With the advancement of the internet, there are now several tools available to aid in the detection of plagiarism

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...

and multiple publication

Multiple publication

Duplicate publication, multiple publication, or redundant publication refers to publishing the same intellectual material more than once, by the author or publisher...

within biomedical literature. One tool developed in 2006 by researchers in Dr. Harold Garner

Harold Garner

Harold Ray Garner is a biophysicist with distinguished research careers both in plasma physics, in bioengineering and bioinformatics. Dr. Garner was born in St. Louis, Mo. on February 5, 1954....

's laboratory at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas

University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas

The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center is one of the biomedical research institutions of the University of Texas System, incorporating three degree-granting institutions, four affiliated hospitals, including Parkland Memorial, the teaching hospital, and biomedical research...

is Déjà Vu, an open-access database containing several thousand instances of duplicate publication. All of the entries in the database were discovered through the use of text data mining algorithm eTBLAST

ETBLAST

eTBLAST is a free text similarity service search engine currently offering access to the MEDLINE database, the National Institutes of Health CRISP database, the Institute of Physics database, Wikipedia, arXiv, the NASA technical reports database, Virginia Tech class descriptions and a variety of...

, also created in Dr. Garner's laboratory. The creation of Déjà Vu and the subsequent classification of several hundred articles contained therein have ignited much discussion in the scientific community concerning issues such as ethical behavior

Ethics

, journal standards, and intellectual copyright. Studies on this database have been published in journals such as Nature
Nature (journal)
Nature, first published on 4 November 1869, is ranked the world's most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports...

and Science
Science (journal)
Science is the academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is one of the world's top scientific journals....

, among others.

Other tools which may be used to detect falsified data include error analysis

Error analysis

Error analysis is the study of kind and quantity of error that occurs, particularly in the fields of applied mathematics , applied linguistics and statistics.- Error analysis in numerical modeling :...

. Measurements generally have a small amount of error, and repeated measurements of the same item will generally result in slight differences in readings. These differences can be analyzed, and follow certain known mathematical and statistical properties. Should a set of data appear to be too faithful to the hypothesis, i.e., the amount of error that would normally be in such measurements does not appear, a conclusion can be drawn that the data may have been forged. Error analysis alone is typically not sufficient to prove that data have been falsified, but it may provide the supporting evidence necessary to confirm suspicions of misconduct.

Data sharing

Kirby Lee and Lisa Bero suggest, "Although reviewing raw data can be difficult, time-consuming and expensive, having such a policy would hold authors more accountable for the accuracy of their data and potentially reduce scientific fraud or misconduct."

In China

H. Zhong, T. Liu, and their co-workers at Jinggangshan University
Jinggangshan University
Jinggangshan University is located at the Ji'an city of Jiangxi province in China. Ji'an is located in the foot of Jinggangshan Mountains.The university has approximately 27,000 students and about 200 foreign students.-History:...

have retracted numerous papers published in Acta Crystallographica
Acta Crystallographica
Acta Crystallographica refers to a family of scientific journals, with peer-reviewed articles about crystallography, published by the International Union of Crystallography...

following systematic checking which revealed that the organic structures claimed in these papers were impossible or implausible. The supporting data appeared to have been taken from valid cases which had then been altered by substituting different atoms into the structures.

Great Britain

Richard Eastell - Actonel Affair; resigned after allegations of financial irregularities; (Medicine)
Malcolm Pearce (author) - Fraudulent description of successful reimplantation of ectopic pregnancy
Ectopic pregnancy
An ectopic pregnancy, or eccysis , is a complication of pregnancy in which the embryo implants outside the uterine cavity. With rare exceptions, ectopic pregnancies are not viable. Furthermore, they are dangerous for the parent, since internal haemorrhage is a life threatening complication...

Japan

Teruji Cho (Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

, Plasma Physics)
Kazunari Taira (molecular biology
Molecular biology
Molecular biology is the branch of biology that deals with the molecular basis of biological activity. This field overlaps with other areas of biology and chemistry, particularly genetics and biochemistry...

)
Akio Sugino (Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

, molecular biology
Molecular biology
Molecular biology is the branch of biology that deals with the molecular basis of biological activity. This field overlaps with other areas of biology and chemistry, particularly genetics and biochemistry...

)

In the Netherlands

Diederik Stapel
Diederik Stapel
Diederik Alexander Stapel is a former professor of social psychology at Tilburg University and before that at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. In 2011 Tilburg University suspended Stapel, pending further investigation, for admittedly fabricating and manipulating data for his...

, social psychology
Social psychology
Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...

) – fabricated data in high-publicity studies of human behaviour

Norway

A researcher employed by a Norwegian hospital (Stavanger universitetssjukehus) analyzed samples of spinal fluid from patients, after the researcher had added a substance to the sample.
Jon Sudbø
Jon Sudbø
Jon Sudbø is a dentist and a consultant oncologist and former medical researcher at The Radium Hospital in Oslo, Norway. Having earlier been licensed as a dentist and a physician, he earned a doctorate in 2001. Until February 2006 he was an associate Professor at the University of Oslo...

fabricated data for a study that reported "nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs reduced the risk of oral cancer".

South Africa

Werner Bezwoda, who admitted to scientific misconduct in trials on high-dose chemotherapy on breast cancer.

Spain

Juan Carlos Mejuto and Gonzalo Astray (Chemical Physics
Chemical physics
Chemical physics is a subdiscipline of chemistry and physics that investigates physicochemical phenomena using techniques from atomic and molecular physics and condensed matter physics; it is the branch of physics that studies chemical processes from the point of view of physics...

). Two papers in Journal of Chemical and Engineering Data withdrawn by the editor because of plagiarism.

United States

Marc Hauser
Marc Hauser
Marc D. Hauser is an American evolutionary biologist and a researcher in primate behavior and animal cognition who taught in the Psychology Department at Harvard University. In August 2010, a committee of Harvard faculty found Hauser solely responsible for eight counts of unspecified scientific...

(evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology is an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, that is, the functional...

).
Doctoral student Roxana Gonzalez (social psychology
Social psychology
Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...

) engaged in scientific misconduct in research supported by National Institute of Mental Health
National Institute of Mental Health
The National Institute of Mental Health is one of 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health...

(NIMH) and National Institutes of Health
National Institutes of Health
The National Institutes of Health are an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and are the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and health-related research. Its science and engineering counterpart is the National Science Foundation...

(NIH). The United States Office of Research Integrity
United States Office of Research Integrity
The Office of Research Integrity is one of the bodies concerned with research integrity in the United States. It was created when the Office of Scientific Integrity in the National Institutes of Health and the Office of Scientific Integrity Review in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for...

found that data falsification altered five published articles first-authored by Jennifer Lerner
Jennifer Lerner
Jennifer Lerner is an experimental social psychologist known for her research in emotion, effects on judgment and decision making. She is currently a professor of Public Policy and Management at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government as well as the Faculty Director of the Harvard Decision Science...

. As a result, articles were retracted from the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Biological Psychiatry, and the Journal of Experimental Psychology.
Victor Ninov
Victor Ninov
Victor Ninov is a former researcher in the nuclear chemistry group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who was alleged to have fabricated the evidence used to claim the creation of ununoctium and ununhexium....

(nuclear physics
Nuclear physics
Nuclear physics is the field of physics that studies the building blocks and interactions of atomic nuclei. The most commonly known applications of nuclear physics are nuclear power generation and nuclear weapons technology, but the research has provided application in many fields, including those...

)
Jan Hendrik Schön (Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

, physics of semiconductors) - forged results, using the same graph image in different contexts
Leo A. Paquette (chemistry
Chemistry
Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....

)
Scott Reuben
Scott Reuben
Scott S. Reuben was Professor of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts and chief of acute pain at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts before being sentenced to prison for health care fraud...

(medical management of pain)

Karen M. Ruggiero (social psychology
Social psychology
Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...

), fabricated data on 240 participants in a study supported by NIH

Non-institutional and non-corporate research

Cyril Burt
Cyril Burt
Sir Cyril Lodowic Burt was an English educational psychologist who made contributions to educational psychology and statistics....

was an English educational psychologist who made contributions to educational psychology and statistics.Burt is known for his studies on the heritability of IQ. Shortly after he died, his studies of inheritance and intelligence came into disrepute after evidence emerged indicating he had falsified research data.

Albert Steinschneider - Sleep apnea
Sleep apnea
Sleep apnea is a sleep disorder characterized by abnormal pauses in breathing or instances of abnormally low breathing, during sleep. Each pause in breathing, called an apnea, can last from a few seconds to minutes, and may occur 5 to 30 times or more an hour. Similarly, each abnormally low...

, SIDS
Sudden infant death syndrome
Sudden infant death syndrome is marked by the sudden death of an infant that is unexpected by medical history, and remains unexplained after a thorough forensic autopsy and a detailed death scene investigation. An infant is at the highest risk for SIDS during sleep, which is why it is sometimes...
Andrew Wakefield
Andrew Wakefield
Andrew Wakefield is a British former surgeon and medical researcher, known as an advocate for the discredited claim that there is a link between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, autism and bowel disease, and for his fraudulent 1998 research paper in support of that claim.Four years after...

, who claimed links between the MMR vaccine
MMR vaccine
The MMR vaccine is an immunization shot against measles, mumps, and rubella . It was first developed by Maurice Hilleman while at Merck in the late 1960s....

, autism and inflammatory bowel disease
Inflammatory bowel disease
In medicine, inflammatory bowel disease is a group of inflammatory conditions of the colon and small intestine. The major types of IBD are Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis.-Classification:...

. He was found guilty of dishonesty in his research and banned from medicine by the UK General Medical Council
General Medical Council
The General Medical Council registers and regulates doctors practising in the United Kingdom. It has the power to revoke or restrict a doctor's registration if it deems them unfit to practise...

following an investigation by Brian Deer
Brian Deer
Brian Deer is a British investigative reporter, best known for inquiries into the drug industry, medicine and social issues for the Sunday Times of London.- Career :...

of the London Sunday Times.

External links

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