Lecture
Fraud in science (scientific fraud) (Scientific misconduct, Scientific fraud, Research misconduct) — a deliberate deception committed by scientists to obtain an undeserved or unlawful benefit. The most serious kinds of scientific fraud are plagiarism and data falsification
The US National Science Foundation identifies three main kinds of scientific fraud :
James Goodwin identifies four kinds of deliberate falsification of data by scientists :
There are different opinions regarding the prevalence of this phenomenon. Some studies show that scientific fraud occurs quite rarely: thus, among approximately 50 thousand researchers funded by the US National Institutes of Health in 1982—1988, 10—15 accusations of unlawful conduct were made annually . According to another study, conducted at an unnamed American university in 1987, about 30% of scientists had at some point suspected colleagues of plagiarism or data falsification, but only about half of them tried to check this or draw the attention of other colleagues to the situation . In 2005, the journal Nature reported that 33% of surveyed scientists funded by the US National Institutes of Health admitted to violating the norms of scientific ethics .
According to the results of a meta-analysis of 18 publications on violations of scientific ethics (mostly in the USA and the UK and mostly in biomedical fields), published in 2009 and carried out by Daniele Fanelli, the frequency of admissions that a scientist had committed falsification or manipulation of data at least once ranges from 0.3% to 4.9%, and the true figure is estimated at 1.97% (this estimate should be taken with caution, since the results of the studies are heterogeneous), while 9.54% of scientists (unweighted average across 6 works) admitted to committing less serious violations. Estimates of these indicators made by scientists in regard to their colleagues (based on answers to questions such as "Do you personally know at least one scientist who…") are 14.12% (weighted average) and 28.53% (unweighted average), respectively .
Although only 2% of scientists admitted to their own dishonest handling of data, in absolute terms this figure looks more significant, since scientists publish about 2 million articles annually. Scientific fraud occurs even in articles published in such authoritative publications as The Lancet, Science and Nature .
Among the most sensational events in the scientific community in recent years have been the scandals provoked by the actions of such world-famous scientists as the South Korean biologist Hwang Woo-suk, the German radiophysicist Jan Hendrik Schön, the American immunologist Luk Van Parijs (English)Russian, and the American biomedical scientist Dong-Pyou Han (English)Russian[10][11][12].
Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences E. D. Sverdlov draws attention to the incident involving Japanese scientists from the Center for Developmental Biology of the RIKEN Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (where he was the scientific supervisor), who published in 2014 in the journal Nature two articles presenting the results of experiments on mature mouse cells subjected to various kinds of stress exposure, including immersion in acid — a method that became known as "stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency[en]" (STAP), in the course of which they discovered a novel way of converting cells into an embryo-like (pluripotent) state. This study was initially highly praised by the world scientific community, since it constituted a theoretical and medical discovery and made it possible to simplify the production of stem cells needed for transplantation. However, subsequently, in the course of an internal RIKEN investigation, it was found that Haruko Obokata[en], who was the key figure in the group of researchers, had committed major forgery of photographs and drawings. The consequence of this was the retraction of the publications and the suicide of the study's scientific supervisor, Yoshiki Sasai, who took this step in order to save face[13].
In 2008, the staff of the newspaper "Troitsky Variant", led by M. S. Gelfand, tested the quality of peer review at the "Journal of Scientific Publications of Postgraduate and Doctoral Students", which was included in the VAK list, by submitting to the editorial board, on behalf of a non-existent person, a pseudo-scientific article titled "Corchevatel: A Method for Uniform Deriding of Access Point and Precedence Overloading", which was in fact written by a generator program for pseudo-scientific English-language texts and translated by a machine translator.
There is a non-profit association of scientists engaged in checking dissertations and monographs for plagiarism and data manipulation — the "Free Network Community Dissernet". From the start of its existence through 2015, a level of borrowing deemed unacceptable by the association's experts was found in many hundreds of works examined; thus, among the dissertation works analysed by the end of 2015 that had been defended in the period 2000—2015 in economics and jurisprudence, such works amounted to 3.2%[14]. These noisy exposures came to be called "Dissergate", by analogy with "Watergate"[15].
Under the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences there operates a Commission for Combating the Falsification of Scientific Research, one of whose aims is to fight manifestations of scientific fraud. A high-profile case of scientific fraud examined by this commission became known as the so-called Petrikgate.
Comments