How Common Is Scientific Misconduct?

Hugh Pickens writes "The image of scientists as objective seekers of truth is periodically jeopardized by the discovery of a major scientific fraud. Recent scandals like Hwang Woo-Suk's fake stem-cell lines or Jan Hendrik Schön's duplicated graphs showed how easy it can be for a scientist to publish fabricated data in the most prestigious journals. Daniele Fanelli has an interesting paper on PLoS ONE where she performs a meta-analysis synthesizing previous surveys to determine the frequency with which scientists fabricate and falsify data, or commit other forms of scientific misconduct. A pooled, weighted average of 1.97% of scientists admitted to having fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once — a serious form of misconduct by any standard — and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys asking about the behavior of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices. Misconduct was reported more frequently by medical/pharmacological researchers than others. 'Considering that these surveys ask sensitive questions and have other limitations, it appears likely that this is a conservative estimate of the true prevalence of scientific misconduct,' writes Fanelli. 'It is likely that, if on average 2% of scientists admit to have falsified research at least once and up to 34% admit other questionable research practices, the actual frequencies of misconduct could be higher than this.'"

Comments

This is news?

[schrodingers_rabbit]

Scientists have falsified data since the dawn of scientific discovery. The real qualifier is for what reason. Inventing a completely bogus substance with obviously impossible properties and no proof is accepted, even lauded, when it shores up shaky Newtonian proofs in relatavistic physics, but when a a major corporation pays for it it becomes unacceptable. The only way to promote scientific integrity is to have private, biased companies fund all scientific research, so bad ideas are shot down by an angry scientific community. Of course, there is a chronic lack of ability in science to find the bad ideas...

This proves religion science

[Nexus7]

Not even 1% of priests have admitted to misconduct. Not only that, they are certain in their laws. These laws don't even need proving or experimentationalistic thingies where numbers can be fudged. It is exactly 6000 years!