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LiveScience
Men are more likely than women to commit scientific fraud, a new analysis of misconduct convictions reveals. And the urge to cheat spans the entire range of academic careers, from students to seasoned professors.
For the new study, published Tuesday in the journal mBio, scientists examined 228 cases of misconduct in the records of the United States Office of Research Integrity (ORI), a government agency that oversees research funded by federal, public health-related agencies. Part of the ORI's mission is to monitor investigations of charges such as fabrication of data and plagiarism.
"The big picture is not that most scientists are dishonest, it's the opposite," said study researcher Ferric Fang, a microbiologist at the University of Washington School of Medicine. "But on the other hand, a few scientists being dishonest is a very bad thing, because it casts doubt on the whole enterprise."
Fraud in science
As of May 2012, at least 2,047 biomedical and life science studies had been retracted by the journals that published them, meaning that the studies contained errors or fabrications that rendered their results meaningless.
Fang, along with Arturo Casadevall, a professor of medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York, and colleagues analyzed these studies and found, to their surprise, that 67.4 percent were retracted because of fraud, duplicate publication (essentially, researchers "double-dipping" to get a paper published twice) or plagiarism. [ Understanding the 10 Most Destructive Human Behaviors ]
There are no firm numbers about how much misconduct goes on in science, but Fang, Casadevall and their colleagues turned to the most complete database on the subject, which is run by the ORI. It's the best database in the world, Casadevall said, because the cases have been thoroughly investigated and documented.
Between 1994 and the present, the ORI investigated 228 cases of alleged misconduct. Of these, 215 were found to involve wrongdoing. In 40 percent of these cases, the guilty party was a trainee (a student or postdoctoral researcher). In 32 percent of cases, it was a faculty member, and in 28 percent of cases, the fraud was committed by technicians, study coordinators or other lab staff.
"We originally thought that misconduct was going to be a problem primarily of trainees or people starting out," Casadevall told LiveScience. "We were surprised to find that, in fact, a lot of them were quite established."
Gendered misconduct
Another key finding was the gender schism in fraud. Even given that men outnumber women in the upper echelons of science, males committed more of the fraud than would be expected. The gap appeared on every rung of the career ladder given the relative proportion of men and women at each step.
Among research staff, 43 percent of those committing misconduct were male. Among students, men made up 58 percent of transgressors. That number rose to 69 percent among postdoctoral researchers and to 88 percent of faculty. [ Oops! 5 Retracted Science Results of 2012 ]
Among the 72 faculty members who committed fraud, only nine were female, the researchers found. That's one-third of what would be expected if the genders were committing fraud at the same rates.
It's not clear why the gender gap exists, Casadevall said. Men are generally known to take more risks than women, which could play a role. Additionally, the researchers can't rule out the possibility that women commit misconduct as frequently as men, but don't get caught.
The researchers did find, however, that the proportion of men and women investigated for fraud was similar to the proportion found guilty, Fang said. So the investigation process itself does not appear gender-biased.
Stiff competition for research funding, jobs and scientific awards is likely behind the urge to cheat, Fang said. In the 1960s, 60 percent of researchers who applied for a standard federal research grant won that grant. Today, the chance of success is only 18 percent.
"It's become extraordinarily competitive," Fang told LiveScience.
That doesn't mean that cheating scientists are off the hook ethically, he said, but the environment of science likely contributes to the problem. Among faculty, almost all misconduct recorded by the ORI involved grants or papers, while among trainees and lab staff, the motivations appear to involve working in the "pressure cooker" of a lab where results are expected. The pattern suggests that principal investigators in charge of labs need to take heed of the climate they're creating, Fang said.
"Even without being a crook, you can be a principal investigator who, under pressure, may be creating pressures on your people to generate certain results," he said.
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Leave a Comment:
This is definately a wake up call for people to be mindful of the environment pressures involved in their careers and how it impacts the work being done. That men are more suseptable is interesting. It is disturbing to find those at the highest levels resorting to cheating.Regardless of the temptations or reasons.How disappointing to find fraud from those who know better,misleading and presenting a false image.No decent educated man would ever let his character be sullied, steal from another, nor think of deceiving his peers.It's like selling one's birthright for a bowl of food.
When there are so many who look to leaders in the scientific fields, discovering later some of these have cheated, it truly does reflect poorly and undermines the trust others who have worked so hard to honestly build up. For when repeated scientific work in different fields becomes questionable, you destroy the very foundation of trust people build their basis for reason and principals upon as they relate to science.
not sure if I would consider 'duplicate publishing' scientific fraud though, and that to me renders the study largely meaningless. Yes it's fraud, but to me scientific fraud relates to the misrepresentation of the results, or your data, to make a conclusion fit the hypothesis.
I've worked in R&D and been published more than once.
Cheating definitely goes on. I've had dual MD/PhD's come around sniffing and then double publish off of my own work after the fact due to back room deals with the department head. I have no idea how that guy survived poster sessions and speaking as he had no idea of how to do the development work so he also had no way to know how to answer the inevitable questions either.
I warned that guy if it happened again he'd better be able to do my job as I'd quit thinking and go to switch throwing instead. They did it again. I went to throwing switches. I notified upper management that my superiors intended to put out made up medical results in an attempt to keep their jobs due to the test not working yet. Then I left the company. Nothing was sabotaged. The notes were good and left there. About a year later the company folded the entire project and all involved staff were let go. That would be two dual MD/PhD's and a few others.
Publish or Perish can and does sometimes get out of hand.
Knowingly endangered patients is NEVER OK.
Holding scientists very accountable and NOT giving any slack at all to the cheaters IS necessary so that science remains respectable and in the case of medical research patients are protected from those that would do them harm in a misguided or even criminal attempt to remain employed and keep their ill gotten reputations from being revealed as being a facade.
Summary comment: No mercy to cheaters because it's in no ones interest but the cheaters to encourage that or allow it to continue.