Scientific misconduct


Scientific misconduct is the violation of the standard codes of scholarly conduct and ethical behavior in the publication of professional scientific research. It is the violation of scientific integrity: violation of the scientific method and of research ethics in science, including in the design, conduct, and reporting of research.

Basic definitions and urgency of dealing with misconduct

A Lancet 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 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 damaging for perpetrators and journal audiences and for any individual who exposes it. In addition there are public health implications attached to the promotion of medical or other interventions based on false or fabricated research findings. Scientific misconduct can result in loss of public trust in the integrity of science.
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. However the ORI will only investigate allegations of impropriety where research was funded by federal grants. They routinely monitor such research publications for red flags and their investigation is subject to a statute of limitations. Other private organizations like the Committee of Medical Journal Editors can only police their own members.
A 2025 study from Northwestern University found that "the publication of fraudulent science is outpacing the growth rate of legitimate scientific publications". The study also discovered broad networks of organized scientific fraudsters.

Forms

The U.S. National Science Foundation defines three types of research misconduct: fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism.
  • Fabrication is making up results and recording or reporting them. This is sometimes referred to as "drylabbing". A more minor form of fabrication is where references are included to give arguments the appearance of widespread acceptance, but are actually fake, or do not support the argument.
  • 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. One form is the appropriation of the ideas and results of others, and publishing as to make it appear the author had performed all the work under which the data was obtained. There are recognized subsets of plagiarism:
  • * Citation plagiarism is 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.
  • * Plagiarism-fabrication is the act of mislabeling an unrelated figure from an unrelated publication and reproducing it exactly in a new publication, claiming that it represents new data.
  • * Self-plagiarism or multiple publication of the same content with different titles or in different journals is sometimes also considered misconduct; scientific journals explicitly ask authors not to do this. It is referred to as "salami" in the jargon of medical journal editors. According to some editors, this includes publishing the same article in a different language, counting the same research as multiple publications.
Other types of research misconduct by authors are also recognized:
  • Unmerited authorship is the practice of giving authorship credit to someone improperly. Ghostwriting describes when someone other than the named author makes a major contribution to the research. Sometimes, this is done to mask contributions from authors with a conflict of interest. In other cases, a ghost authorship occurs where the ghost author sells the research paper to a colleague who wants the publication in order to boost their publishing metrics. Guest authorship is the phenomenon wherein authorship is given to someone who has not made any substantial contribution. This can be 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".
  • Some forms of citation bias have been argued to be scientific misconduct, for example deceptive omission to cite articles with opposite conclusions or misrepresenting cited articles.
Misconduct during scholarly peer review process:
  • A reviewer or editor with a conflict of interest can coerce the author to cite the reviewer's publications prior to recommending publication. This can inflate the perceived citation impact of a researcher's work and their reputation in the scientific community, similar to excessive self-citation.
  • Suggesting fake peer reviewers can happen when journals invite authors to recommend a list of suitable peer reviewers, along with their contact information. In some cases, authors have recommended a "reviewer" for whom they provide a fake email address that in fact belongs to the author. If the editor follows the author's reviewer recommendation, the author can then write their own review.
  • A rarer case of scientific misconduct is editorial misconduct, where an editor does not declare conflicts of interest, creates pseudonyms to review papers, gives strongly worded editorial decisions to support reviews suggesting to add excessive citations to their own unrelated works or to add themselves as a co-author or their name to the title of the manuscript.

    Photo manipulation

Compared to other forms of scientific misconduct, image fraud is of particular interest since it can frequently be detected by external parties. 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 such as Adobe Photoshop by scientists, which facilitate photo manipulation. Since then more publishers, including the Nature Publishing Group, have instituted similar tests and require authors to minimize and specify the extent of photo manipulation when a manuscript is submitted for publication. However, there is little evidence to indicate that such tests are applied rigorously. One Nature paper published in 2009 has subsequently been reported to contain around 20 separate instances of image fraud.
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 and contrast of only a part of the image
  • any change that conceals information, even when it is considered to be non-specific, which includes:
  • * changing brightness and contrast to leave only the most intense signal
  • * using clone tools to hide information
  • showing only a very small part of the photograph so that additional information is not visible
Image manipulations are typically done on visually repetitive images such as those of blots and microscope images.

Motivations

According to David Goodstein of Caltech, there are multiple motivators for scientists to commit misconduct, which are briefly summarised here. In many fields of scientific research, productivity and success is measured by the number of publications and related metrics such as impact factor and reputation of the journal an article is published in.
  • Career pressure – Science is a very strongly career-driven discipline. Scientists depend on their record of achievement to receive ongoing support and funding, and a good reputation relies largely on the publication of high-profile scientific papers. Hence, there is a strong imperative to "publish or perish". This pressure is stronger in some research settings than others, contributing to the increased prevalence of misconduct in some parts of the world than others. This may motivate desperate scientists to fabricate results.
  • Ease of fabrication – In many scientific fields, results are often difficult to reproduce accurately, being obscured by noise, artifacts, and other extraneous data. That means that even if a scientist does falsify data, they may expect to get away with it – or at least claim innocence if their results conflict with others in the same field. There are few strongly backed systems to investigate possible violations, attempt to press charges, or punish deliberate misconduct. It is relatively easy to cheat although difficult to know exactly how many scientists fabricate data.
  • Monetary gain – In many scientific fields, the most lucrative options for professionals are often selling opinions. Corporations can pay experts to support products directly or indirectly via conferences. Psychologists can make money by repeatedly acting as an expert witness in custody proceedings for the same law firms.