Daniel BuenoIn the life sciences, men engage in scientific misconduct more frequently than women in the United States, and they do it at every point of the scientific career spectrum from undergraduate research to research group leadership, shows a study published on online news site mBio. The authors reviewed 228 cases of misconduct recorded by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) between 1994 and 2012. The office promotes good research practices and investigates accusations of misconduct involving research supported by the Department of Health and Human Services. Overall,
65% of all fraud cases were committed by men, but the percentage varied according to academic rank: 88% of all faculty members who committed misconduct were men, as compared to 69% of postdoctoral fellows and 58% of undergraduate students.
In each category, the proportion of men involved in scientific fraud was higher than predicted from the gender distribution of life science researchers in the United States. The study did not look into the reasons that drive men to commit fraud more frequently. But cultural differences are one hypothesis that could explain the phenomenon, said Arturo Casadevall, researcher at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New York, one of the study’s authors. “Males tend to be risk takers, more so than females, and to commit fraud entails taking a risk,” he suggested. “It may also be that males are more competitive, or that women are more sensitive to the threat of sanctions. I think the best answer is that we don’t know. Now that we have documented the problem, we can begin a serious discussion about what is going on and what can be done about it,” he affirmed.
The authors started from the assumption that the majority of fraud cases would involve students and young researchers, who are just starting their careers and suffer great pressure to publish papers. However, they observed that misconduct is scattered across the entire academic career spectrum. “You might think that as scientists go up the career ladder, they would feel more secure. But the bigger the lab you run, the more grants you need, which increases the pressures to publish and the temptation to cheat,” said Casadevall.
“The occurrence of misconduct at every level of the scientific hierarchy indicates that misconduct is not a problem limited to trainees and requires careful attention to pressures placed on scientists during different stages of their careers.”
