Findings of scientific misconduct.
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PROVIDER: S-EPMC4259661 | biostudies-literature | 2004 Oct
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Findings of scientific misconduct.
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Project description:Increasing complexity and multidisciplinarity make collaboration essential for modern science. This, however, raises the question of how to assign accountability for scientific misconduct among larger teams of authors. Biomedical societies and science associations have put forward various sets of guidelines. Some state that all authors are jointly accountable for the integrity of the work. Others stipulate that authors are only accountable for their own contribution. Alternatively, there are guarantor type models that assign accountability to a single author. We contribute to this debate by analyzing the outcomes of 80 scientific misconduct investigations of biomedical scholars conducted by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI). We show that the position of authors on the byline of 184 publications involved in misconduct cases correlates with responsibility for the misconduct. Based on a series of binary regression models, we show that first authors are 38% more likely to be responsible for scientific misconduct than authors listed in the middle of the byline (p<0.01). Corresponding authors are 14% more likely (p<0.05). These findings suggest that a guarantor-like model where first authors are ex-ante accountable for misconduct is highly likely to not miss catching the author responsible, while not afflicting too many bystanders.
| S-EPMC6497379 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Background and aimCitations in academia have long been regarded as a fundamental means of acknowledging the contribution of past work and promoting scientific advancement. The aim of this paper was to investigate the impact that misconduct allegations made against scholars have on the citations of their work, comparing allegations of sexual misconduct (unrelated to the research merit) and allegations of scientific misconduct (directly related to the research merit).MethodsWe collected citation data from the Web of Science (WoS) in 2021, encompassing 31,941 publications from 172 accused and control scholars across 18 disciplines. We also conducted two studies: one on non-academics (N = 231) and one on academics (N = 240).ResultsThe WoS data shows that scholars accused of sexual misconduct incur a significant citation decrease in the three years after the accusations become public, while we do not detect a significant citation decrease for scholars accused of scientific misconduct. The study involving non-academics suggests that individuals are more averse to sexual than to scientific misconduct. Finally, contrary to the WoS data findings, a sample of academics indicates they are more likely to cite scholars accused of sexual misconduct than those accused of scientific misconduct.ConclusionsIn the first three years after accusations became public, scholars accused of sexual misconduct incur a larger citation penalty than scholars accused of scientific misconduct. However, when asked to predict their citing behavior, scholars indicated the reverse pattern, suggesting they might mis-predict their behavior or be reluctant to disclose their preferences.
| S-EPMC11882088 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Integrity and trust in that integrity are fundamental to academic research. However, procedures for monitoring the trustworthiness of research, and for investigating cases where concern about possible data fraud have been raised are not well established. Here we suggest a practical approach for the investigation of work suspected of fraudulent data manipulation using Benford's Law. This should be of value to both individual peer-reviewers and academic institutions and journals. In this, we draw inspiration from well-established practices of financial auditing. We provide synthesis of the literature on tests of adherence to Benford's Law, culminating in advice of a single initial test for digits in each position of numerical strings within a dataset. We also recommend further tests which may prove useful in the event that specific hypotheses regarding the nature of data manipulation can be justified. Importantly, our advice differs from the most common current implementations of tests of Benford's Law. Furthermore, we apply the approach to previously-published data, highlighting the efficacy of these tests in detecting known irregularities. Finally, we discuss the results of these tests, with reference to their strengths and limitations.
| S-EPMC10088595 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundScientific misconduct is a prevalent phenomenon with many undesirable consequences. In Iran, no original research have been done about scientific fraud. So, this study aimed at describing a challenging research misconduct in Iran, its related causes, and the ways Iranian authorities deal with it.MethodsIn this cross-sectional study, through a two-year period, all the advertisements installed in the study sites were collected and the content analysis was performed. Semi-structured interviews were held with experts for discovering the causes of misconduct. Also, published issues were collected for review of the laws on confronting the fraud in Iran.ResultsThe content analysis resulted in identifying four categories of misconduct issues: advertising approach, types of services, outcome guarantee, and justifying the academic credit. Besides, reviewing the related literature indicated that Iranian government and the responsible authorities have recently established serious penalties for dealing with scientific misconduct through legislation.ConclusionsThis study revealed some misconduct in scientific activities which has persuaded the authorities to enforce strict rules to deal with it. The effectiveness of this legislation needs to be investigated in some further studies.
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Project description:A detailed review of all 2,047 biomedical and life-science research articles indexed by PubMed as retracted on May 3, 2012 revealed that only 21.3% of retractions were attributable to error. In contrast, 67.4% of retractions were attributable to misconduct, including fraud or suspected fraud (43.4%), duplicate publication (14.2%), and plagiarism (9.8%). Incomplete, uninformative or misleading retraction announcements have led to a previous underestimation of the role of fraud in the ongoing retraction epidemic. The percentage of scientific articles retracted because of fraud has increased ∼10-fold since 1975. Retractions exhibit distinctive temporal and geographic patterns that may reveal underlying causes.
| S-EPMC3479492 | biostudies-literature
Project description:There is increased concern about perverse incentives, quantitative performance metrics, and hyper-competition for funding and faculty positions in US academia. Recipients of the prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships (n = 244) from Civil and Environmental Engineering (45.5%) and Computer Science and Engineering (54.5%) were anonymously surveyed to create a baseline snapshot of their perceptions, behaviors and experiences. NSF Fellows ranked scientific advancement as the top metric for evaluating academics followed by publishing in high-impact journals, social impact of research, and publication/citation counts. The self-reported rate of academic cheating was 16.7% and of research misconduct was 3.7%. Thirty-one percent of fellows reported direct knowledge of graduate peers cheating, and 11.9% had knowledge of research misconduct by colleagues. Only 30.7% said they would report suspected misconduct. A majority of fellows (55.3%) felt that mandatory ethics trainings left them unprepared for dealing with ethical issues. Fellows stated academic freedom, flexible schedules and opportunity to mentor students were the most positive aspects of academia, whereas pressures for funding, publication, and tenure were cited as the most negative aspects. These data may be useful in considering how to better prepare STEM graduate trainees for academic careers.
| S-EPMC10080524 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BACKGROUND:Despite the implementation of codes and declarations of medical research ethics, unethical behavior is still reported among researchers. Most of the medical faculties have included topics related to medical research ethics and developed ethical committees; yet, in some cases, unethical behaviors are still observed, and many obstacles are still conferring to applying these guidelines. METHODS:This cross-sectional questionnaire-based study was conducted by interviewing randomly selected 331 Lebanese physicians across Lebanon, to assess their awareness, knowledge and attitudes on practice regarding international and national research ethics guidelines (Lebanese decrees/Laws and CNRS chart of ethics) and scientific misconduct and misbehaviors. RESULTS:Our results revealed that although majority of participants declared familiar with ethical principles governing research that involves human subjects (79.5%), the overall mean score achieved on their knowledge questions was 46%. Only 27.4% are aware of the presence of the Lebanese National Consultative Committee on Ethics (LNCCE), with only half of them aware of its functions and only 25.7% know about the charter of ethics and guiding principles of scientific research in Lebanon. Significant higher levels of research ethics knowledge were recorded among Ph.D. degree-holding subjects, higher university positions as in professors, research ethics trainings-attendees, and physicians with prior research experience. A significant correlation was observed between knowledge of research ethics principles and positive attitudes toward research ethics principles. Noteworthy, we found that more than one third of participants have reported witnessing scientific misconduct and misbehaviors at some period of their careers. CONCLUSIONS:The presence of low mean awareness levels regarding research ethical principles among the study population of physicians and high levels of perception of scientific misconduct raises concern on the importance of implementing proper training for physicians on research ethics.
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