Research misconduct

See 42 CFR Part 93 Public Health Service Policies on Research Misconduct (2005) (sanctions can include imprisonment). 

Research misconduct strikes at the very heart of scientific objectivity. It raises doubts about the integrity of the science and our trust in the work of others. We must be able to believe in the reliability of scientific research. 

There has been much published on the incidence, detection and prosecution of publication fraud, rather less on fraud and misconduct in clinical research, but we should be equally concerned about research fraud. The Consensus Conference on Misconduct in Biomedical Research convened by the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine and the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1999 defined research misconduct as behavior by a researcher, intentional or not, that falls short of good ethical and scientific standards . Frank Wells, co-founder of MedicoLegal Investigations Ltd., the only specialist research fraud investigation company in Europe, prefers the generation of false data with the intention to deceive . 

Although European countries take research fraud and misconduct seriously, most have no official sanctions in research fraud. The first research misconduct committees in the Nordic countries date from the early 1990s. Their roles may be both preventive and investigative, but they do not, for the most part, allow sanctions to be taken that remains in the hands of the institutions. 

Many of the doctors brought before the GMC for research misconduct have been involved with more than one pharmaceutical company, and the Medical Director of the ABPI has a process to bring together two or more companies with suspicions about the same doctor to enable a joint case to be made. A similar process exists in Germany. Sadly, there are, as yet, no sanctions if a company refuses to cooperate or investigate. 

Farthing MJG. 2004. Publish, and be damned... The road to research misconduct. J. R. Coll. Physicians Edinb. 34 301-304. 

In 2001, after noticing that two of Schon s published articles, reporting on the results of different experiments, contained identical noise graphs, two university researchers called some of the published papers into question. Lucent Technologies, of which Bell Laboratories was then a unit, formed an Investigation Committee in May 2002 to explore the possibility of research misconduct by Schon and his co-authors. 

The Committee confirmed 16 of the 24 allegations of research misconduct it had identified and scrufiifized. In addition, other questionable research practices were discovered and disclosed. Eventually 28 papers by Schon and his... 

But the Schon case also encompasses phenomena that, while not falling under the prevailing US government definition of research misconduct, exemplify what one researcher calls other deviations from acceptable research practices, deviations widely regarded as unethical. In what follows, I shall call them ethically questionable research practices. Discussion of three of them follows. 

It is striking that the Bell Labs Investigation Committee completely cleared all of Schon s collaborators and co-authors of all charges of research misconduct but was non-committal on the non-FFP ethically questionable research practices involved. This shows that no consensus yet exists in the research community about the ethical responsibility of researchers to avoid forms of ethically problematic research conduct beyond FFP, including dubious authorship practices that could be just as harmful as cases of FFP. 

Micro-social. The only previous case study in this book that dealt with engineering research - Case 03, the Schon case - focused on research misconduct and several ethically problematic research practices linked with collaborative research. Here I shall examine ethical responsibilities related to several different ethically questionable research practices, only the first of which is specific to nanotechnology. 

The ORI website - http //ori.dhhs.gov/case summary - provides case summaries for all administrative actions that were imposed due to findings of research misconduct. It lists 43 case summaries of incidents resolved between 2008 and Older and 2013. Of the 43, none involves engineering research. Only one, involving bioinformatics, is even remotely related to engineering. 

Research misconduct with significant risk of imminent patient harm. 

See Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect Understanding How Good People Turn Bull (New York Random House, 2007) and Nature Podcast on the dark side of science research misconduct, January 18, 2007, based on the article by Jim Giles, "Breeding cheats," Nature, 445 (January... 

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