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

Re:It's quite common

[speculatrix]

when I did chemistry at 6th form college (UK term, in US I suppose you'd call it senior high?), I recall doing a practical test in chemistry (titration) where you had some mystery chemicals and a colour change. the experiment was rigged so that it was somewhat like a reaction we'd already seen, but was in fact something quite different. the instructions were to make accurate measurements first, draw the appropriate graphs and *then* speculate on the mystery ingredients.

it turned out that we'd never encountered the particular reagents before, and if you did the test accurately you'd have realised it wasn't the old familiar reaction, but had to be something new - the figures would simply not add up. however, a significant number of people rejigged their results to match the known reaction and failed the test totally for two reasons, first being for failing to make accurate measurements and secondly for faking the results.

gray area

[bcrowell]

There's a big gray area. For instance, the Millikan oil drop experiment, which established quantization of charge, was arguably fraudulent. Millikan threw out all the data he didn't like, and then stated in his paper that he had never thrown out any data. His result was correct, but the way he went about proving it was ethically suspect.