How many scientists fabricate and falsify

Inquiry 39 , — Article Google Scholar. Fanelli, D. Download references. Correspondence 09 NOV Career Column 29 OCT News 11 NOV Career Guide 10 NOV News 09 NOV News 08 NOV Francis Crick Institute. Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Sensitivity analysis of admission rates of data fabrication, falsification and alteration in non-self reports. Discussion This is the first meta-analysis of surveys asking scientists about their experiences of misconduct. Supporting Information. Table S1. Studies excluded from the review. Table S2. Self-report questions included in review, and responses.

Table S3. Non-self report questions included in the review, and responses. Table S4. Sensitivity analysis for meta-regression model. Acknowledgments I wish to thank Nicholas Steneck, Tom Tregenza, Gavin Stewart, Robin Williams and two anonymous referees for comments that helped to improve the manuscript, and Moyra Forrest for helping to search the literature.

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Accountability in Research 3: — Tangney JP Fraud will out? Or will it? New Scientist 62— Journal of Dental Research — Addiction Research 6: — Academic Medicine — Committee on Publication Ethics. Science and Engineering Ethics 6: — In recent years, a regular flow of high-profile cases of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism FFP has been covered in the media. These have come from countries around the world, and they have been notable due to the prominence of the researchers involved, the importance of the work shown to be false or unreliable, the scale of the transgression in terms of, say, the number of papers to be retracted, or some combination of these factors.

A few examples taken from the past few years:. Over the past several decades, as federal agencies and research institutions have had to address research misconduct more frequently and institute formal policies, more information has become available about the incidence and significance of research misconduct. In its semiannual reports to Congress, NSF reported just 1 finding of misconduct in , 2 in , and 6 in , compared with 17 findings in , 14 in , and 22 in A rate of 16 findings per year represents less than two hundredths of a percent of the new awards NSF makes.

Research misconduct findings by ORI have shown less of an upward trend in the past decade, with 12 findings in , 8 in both and , 14 in , 12 in , and 13 in Just as statistics on arrests or convictions will tend to undercount the number of crimes actually committed, the statistics on research misconduct findings will tend to undercount the actual incidence Steneck, In addition to these official statistics, a number of surveys of researchers regarding their practices have been undertaken in recent years.

Similarly, a meta-analysis of researcher surveys indicates that the incidence of FFP is somewhat higher than the official statistics indicate, with about 2 percent of researchers admitting to fabricating or falsifying data at least once, and more than 14 percent aware of colleagues having done so Fanelli, Survey reports on misconduct by colleagues might be inflated by multiple researchers reporting the same incidents; one of the surveys attempted to avoid this by not including more than one researcher from a given department and found that 7.

At the same time, the narrower group of respondents would not be expected to know about all cases of misconduct among colleagues, making this a conservative estimate.

The same meta-analysis showed that actions discussed in Chapter 4 as examples of detrimental research practices DRPs are relatively common. A survey on violations of research regulations—including human subjects protection violations as well as research misconduct—was sent to all comprehensive doctoral institutions and medical schools in the United States and yielded responses from 66 percent DuBois et al.

The results reinforce the federal agency data cited above showing a significant rise in allegations—96 percent of the responding institutions had undertaken an investigation in the preceding year, with the modal number being 3 to 5 per year. Determining the incidence of plagiarism and related trends faces some particular barriers. The difficulty in defining plagiarism continues to be an obstacle. While plagiarism detection software has recently grown in popularity, text matches are not necessarily plagiarized Wager, Text matches may occur for a variety of reasons, including copublication, legal republication, common phrases, and multiple versions of a publication Wager, However, there are indications that the overall level of plagiarism in legitimate biomedical journals peaked at some point in the last decade and has been declining since as the use of plagiarism detection software by journals has become widespread Reich, a.

Despite the likely decline in incidences, differences persist between journals in how they respond to plagiarism allegations Long et al. The appearance of a large number of journals that appear to have little concern about publishing copied or duplicated work—many of which operate under an author-pays, open-access business model—has created a new channel for papers to be plagiarized Grens, a.

Other recent research has examined retractions of scientific articles in journals Fang et al. Articles may be retracted for a number of reasons, including unintentional errors on the part of authors or publishers as well as research misconduct. One recent analysis that focused on articles contained in the PubMed database found that more than two-thirds of retractions were due to misconduct defined as FFP Fang et al.

Another analysis that examined retractions of articles in a variety of databases that collectively covered all disciplines between and found that 17 percent of the 3, retractions in which a cause was identified were due to data fabrication or falsification, and 22 percent were due to plagiarism Grieneisen and Zhang, This research also found that there are more retractions in certain disciplines than would be expected based on their representation in the overall research literature e.

These analyses have also found a sharp increase in the number of retractions over time, particularly over the past decade or so.

Although the increase in the number of articles published annually is a contributing factor, the rate of retraction is also increasing. For example, an analysis of papers in the PubMed database found that the number of retractions has increased tenfold in recent years, while the total number of papers has only increased by 44 percent Van Noorden, As with other statistics cited here, there are reasons to be cautious about using the number and rate of retractions as proxies for the incidence of misconduct or error.

One analysis suggests that both the barriers to publishing flawed work and to retracting articles have been lowered over time Steen et al. Retraction rates, particularly at the country and disciplinary level, can be skewed by the serial misconduct cases mentioned above, where a researcher has fabricated or falsified data underlying tens of articles Grieneisen and Zhang, On the one hand, retracted papers still represent only a small proportion of the overall literature, and formal retractions have only gradually become a standard practice.

On the other hand, some evidence suggests that many fraudulent papers are never retracted Couzin and Unger, and all of the admittedly imperfect proxy measures for the incidence of research misconduct have displayed significant increases in recent years. Research misconduct and DRPs constitute failures to uphold the values of science. Even if they had no wider consequences, it would be vital to prevent and address them.

However, a variety of costs and consequences can be conceptualized even if they are difficult to quantify or measure precisely.

The costs of research misconduct and DRPs can be broken down into 1 damage to the individuals, 2 reputational costs to the employer of the transgressor and the journal that published the work, 3 direct financial costs, 4 broader social costs, and 5 opportunity costs associated with categories 1 through 4. Figure illustrates these costs. Examples of the many individual costs of research misconduct and DRPs are wasted efforts of researchers who trusted a fabricated paper and did work to build on it, damage done to innocent collaborators including graduate students and.

One measure of the wasted efforts of later researchers is the extent to which papers based on fabricated data are cited, even if they are retracted surprisingly often Neale et al. To give one example, in the s the Geological Survey of India and Panjab University found that paleontologist Viswa Jit Gupta had fabricated and falsified data on fossil discoveries over more than 20 years Jayaraman, Reputational costs include the losses in prestige experienced by research institutions employing the author of a fabricated or falsified paper and by the journals publishing it.

Direct financial costs are borne by a number of stakeholders. Costs can include the funds provided by federal or private sponsors spent on fabricated or falsified research, the expense of investigating an allegation borne by the institution, and any additional funds that the institution pays to settle civil litigation connected with the misconduct.

There have been efforts to directly measure the costs of research misconduct in particular cases or groups of cases. This method of analysis has limitations, since the research underlying articles is often supported by multiple sources and funding may not be cited. Funding for an additional articles retracted due to misconduct over that period could not be tracked completely Stern et al.

This analysis only looks at cases where an investigation has been completed and findings of misconduct have been made. In another example of an effort to estimate the direct costs of funding for research that is fabricated or falsified, a report by the U.

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.

Abstract The frequency with which scientists fabricate and falsify data, or commit other forms of scientific misconduct is a matter of controversy. Gov't Review Systematic Review.