More than 5 percent of scientists answering a confidential questionnaire admitted to having tossed out data because the information contradicted their previous research or said they had circumvented some human research protections.
Ten percent admitted they had inappropriately included their names or those of others as authors on published research reports.
And more than 15 percent admitted they had changed a study's design or results to satisfy a sponsor, or ignored observations because they had a "gut feeling" they were inaccurate.
None of those failings qualifies as outright scientific misconduct under the strict definition used by federal regulators. But they could take at least as large a toll on science as the rare, high-profile cases of clear-cut falsification, said Brian Martinson, an investigator with the HealthPartners Research Foundation in Minneapolis, who led the study appearing in today's issue of the journal Nature."
It just irks me to no end to think about sloppy research and the potential harm it can do.
"Science has changed a lot in terms of its competitiveness, the level of funding and the commercial pressures on scientists," Martinson said. "We've turned science into a big business but failed to note that some of the rules of science don't fit well with that model."
Scientific dishonesty has long been a simmering concern. Many suspect, for example, that Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk whose plant-breeding experiments revealed with suspicious precision the basic laws of genetics, cooked his numbers along with his peas.
In recent decades a handful of cases have risen to the level of popular attention -- the most famous, perhaps, involving David Baltimore, the Nobel laureate who in the mid-1980s heatedly defended his laboratory's honor in a series of scathing congressional hearings led by Rep. John D. Dingell (news, bio, voting record) (D-Mich.).
The prevalence of research misconduct has been uncertain, however, in part because the definitions of acceptable behavior have shifted. For scientists working with federal grant money, that issue got settled five years ago when the Office of Research Integrity -- part of the Department Health And Human Services -- drafted a formal definition: "fabrication, falsification or plagiarism in proposing, performing or reviewing research, or in reporting research results."About a dozen federally funded scientists a year are found to have breached that "FFP" standard -- a tiny fraction of the scientific workforce -- and punishment generally involves a ban on further federal grants. But no one had conducted a major survey asking scientists whether they are guilty of major misconduct or lesser, but arguably still serious, ethics lapses.
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