Over the last few years, a series of high-profile retractions, resignations, and lawsuits have shaken academic science. In 2018, Brian Wansink, the head of Cornell University’s Food and Brand lab, resigned after the American Medical Association retracted six of his studies. Wansink’s work was highly influential, serving as the basis of the Obama administration’s “Smarter Lunchrooms” school lunch program. In July, Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned amidst allegations that he falsified data in his Alzheimer’s research. In October, Harvard behavioral scientist Francesca Gino was placed on administrative leave after independent investigators claimed she falsified data. She is now embroiled in a defamation lawsuit against her accusers and her university. At the beginning of 2024, Harvard president Claudine Gay resigned after extensive plagiarism was discovered in her published work. Currently, Harvard’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute plans to retract six papers and correct an additional 31 following an investigation into claims of misconduct. The papers were authored by some of the institute’s most venerated researchers, including DFCI president and CEO, Laurie Glimcher. These cases, and others like them, are driving attention to an issue many have been trying to sound the alarm on for years: Scientific misconduct.

In 2021, Richard Smith, former editor in chief of the British Medical Journal and chief executive of the BMJ Publishing Group from 1991 to 2004, warned that “…the time may have come to stop assuming that research actually happened and is honestly reported, and assume that the research is fraudulent until there is some evidence to support it having happened and been honestly reported.” Smith claimed that scientific misconduct is not a problem of a “few bad apples” but an infection of the entire orchard. Others seem to share his concern. Recently, public figures like Bill Ackman have called for a review of all academic work done by tenured staff at MIT, Harvard and other top schools. The Office of Research Integrity has also announced plans to revise their policy on Research Misconduct and aims to strip away some of the secrecy that plagues university investigations.

But not everyone agrees on the extent of the problem. Jeremy Fox, an ecologist at the University of Calgary, claims that scientific misconduct is rare, pointing to anonymous surveys in which only 1-2% of scientists admitted to misconduct. The obvious problem with this approach to measuring misconduct is that it’s not a measure of how many scientists commit misconduct but a measure of how many scientists admit to misconduct. This is further complicated by the fact that there are varying definitions of what scientific misconduct is. Most definitions include, at a minimum, the classic triad of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism . This is the definition drafted/used  by The National Science Foundation and used by the Federal Government. 

The NSF defines fabrication as “making up data or results and recording or reporting them,” falsification as “manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes, or changing or omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the research record” and plagiarism as “the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit.”

While FFP is a helpful starting point, it is limited in scope. Too often, the FFP schema fails to capture deceptive or fraudulent behavior that doesn’t fit neatly into one of these three categories. A scientist failing to report a significant conflict of interest, for example, would not be considered misconduct based on FFP. Yet, it is well known that conflicts of interest can affect the objectivity of research. Recognizing the narrowness of FFP, many organizations have adopted expanded definitions of scientific misconduct. Canada’s definition of scientific misconduct retains the FFP triad, but also includes: “destruction of research records” and “mismanagement of conflict of interest.” Others, apparently hesitant to label certain behaviors as “misconduct” acknowledge a gray area known as “questionable research practices (QRPs)”. The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity goes even farther, affirming the FFP triad, and listing sixteen other “violations of good research practice,” including inappropriate use of p-values, inaccurate citation, and salami publication (deceptively producing multiple papers from the same research in order to increase publication rates). 

A 2009 study, How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data, found between 5 percent and 33 percent of surveyed scientists reported having personal knowledge of a colleague fabricating or falsifying data. When the survey questions replaced the terms “fabrication” and “falsification” with gentler phrases like “data misrepresentation” or “altering” research to “improve outcomes” between 6.2 percent and 72 percent gave affirmative answers. One plausible explanation for the range in these responses is the discrepancy of definitions. Researchers who are merely concerned with avoiding FFP may be unaware that their colleagues have crossed the line between cleaning up “noise” in their data and dishonest manipulation. Variations in the way definitions of misconduct treat QRP’s is a prime suspect in this confusion. In his article, Measuring the prevalence of questionable research practices with incentives for truth telling, John Leslie notes “QRPs, by nature of the very fact that they are often questionable as opposed to blatantly improper, also offer considerable latitude for rationalization and self-deception.” 

Another approach to defining scientific misconduct is by broadly appealing to scientific consensus. For example, the Wikipedia entry for scientific misconduct defines the term as “…the violation of the standard codes of scholarly conduct and ethical behavior in the publication of professional scientific research.”  In contrast to the enumerative approach, this definition identifies misconduct as (allow me to restate it slightly for clarity) a deviation from accepted norms among scientists. This is not new. In the 1980’s, the federal government attempted to address scientific misconduct by establishing the Office of Scientific Integrity, which defined misconduct as FFP, plus “…other practices that seriously deviate from those that are commonly accepted within the scientific community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research.” While this component of the definition was dropped in the early 90’s, many institutions continue to use this language, or employ similar appeals to what is “commonly accepted” as their standard for measuring misconduct. 

There are two significant problems with a consensus definition of scientific misconduct. First, truthful scientific endeavors may completely overturn “commonly accepted” practices in the scientific community, as we wrote about last year, The Dangers of Singular Authority. Genuine innovations in measurement technology, statistical tools, and processes can and do disrupt what is commonly accepted among scientists. Second, practices that are commonly accepted among scientists may in fact be deceptive. As it turns out, the wikipedia definition of scientific misconduct proves to be both illustrative of this point, and deeply ironic. 

Wikipedia’s definition was first published by an anonymous wikipedia editor in 2004 (note this date!).