misconduct

The fear of being caught

Issue # 209
jul 2013

Daniel Bueno

The University of Sussex, England, has established a pilot program to fight scientific misconduct, which if successful, could become the model for the UK government’s Office of Scientific Integrity. The foundation of the program, whose costs are still being determined, is the creation of an auditing group responsible for regularly checking the procedures and findings of the scientific research conducted at the university. A percentage of the research projects will be selected at random and subjected to rigorous checks before or after publication. Various aspects will be analyzed, such as the raw data on which the conclusions are based, evidence of plagiarism and an analysis of the veracity of images. Michael Farthing, vice chancellor of the University of Sussex and vice president of the British Office of Scientific Integrity, presented the plan at the 3rd World Conference on Scientific Integrity held in Montreal in May 2013. He believes that the fear of being caught at any time, like athletes subjected to doping tests, can be a powerful stimulus to prevent fraud and plagiarism.

According to Farthing, universities are already accustomed to monitoring their spending and learning outcomes, but there is no similar mechanism to check whether or not research is being done properly, with the exception of studies involving clinical trials. “This is despite some institutions receiving more than half of their research funds from public sources,” he told the Times Higher Education website. The program also provides for other measures, such as registering studies as soon as they begin, as currently happens with clinical trials, and tracking researchers when they move from one institution to another, since communication between universities about professionals suspected of misconduct is still lacking. He cites the example of Jatinder Ahluwalia, whose expulsion from the PhD program at the University of Cambridge in 1998, due to suspected fraud, only became known to other institutions in 2010 after an investigation concluded that he falsified data in a scientific paper published in 2004 together with his post-doctoral supervisor at University College, London. “The misconduct continued for 15 years because the available information was not circulated,” he said.