A team of researchers studied 343 cases from between 1993 and 2023 to analyze the severity of punishments for scientists accused of misconduct by the US Office of Scientific Integrity (ORI), which oversees publicly funded research in the country. Their conclusions, published in the journal Accountability in Research – Ethics, Integrity and Policy, show that the agency strictly followed government guidelines when imposing sanctions on researchers who committed ethical misconduct. The data analyzed demonstrated no biases related to the gender, race, or academic or administrative position of those being punished.
The most common type of sanction, handed down in 65% of cases, was a three-year funding ban or research supervision period. “I suppose that this is the default length of time and may represent a penalty that imposes a true hardship on a researcher without necessarily being career-ending,” Ferric Fang, a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine and one of the study’s authors, told Retraction Watch.
There has been at least one case, however, in which a researcher was banned from receiving federal funds for the rest of their life. In 2019, Dr. Erin Potts-Kant of Duke University was sanctioned for falsifying data in scientific articles and research reports related to a project that had received US$200 million in federal funding (see Pesquisa FAPESP issue nº 279). Punishments of longer than three years were applied more frequently when researchers were required to retract or correct erroneous work or when there were aggravating circumstances, such as attempts by the accused to interfere in investigations. Researchers who admitted guilt or whose wrongdoings were considered less serious, such as committing plagiarism, were less affected by funding bans, but they still faced other types of administrative sanctions, such as having their work supervised for certain periods of time.
Despite ORI punishments often requiring papers to be retracted, 32 were identified that have not been retracted to date. “This reflects the fact that only journals can retract publications, and unfortunately, not all appear to take this responsibility seriously,” Fang explained. David Resnik, a bioethics specialist at America’s National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences, pointed out that because the literature has not been properly corrected, scientists may be relying on fraudulent research. “These are people who were caught committing misconduct, were sanctioned by their institutions and the ORI, and were required to correct or retract papers.”
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