- One in three U.S. scientists admitted in an anonymous
survey that they committed scientific misconduct in the previous three
years, according to a report by a team of Minnesota researchers.
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- While falsifying research is uncommon, the survey found
that 33 percent of scientists admitted breaking rules, large and small,
that are supposed to ensure the honesty of their work, the authors report
in the British journal Nature.
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- The types of misbehavior range from claiming credit for
someone else's work, to changing results because of pressure from the sponsor.
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- "Our findings suggest that U.S. scientists engage
in a range of behaviors extending far beyond falsification, fabrication
and plagiarism that can damage the integrity of science," the authors
write in a commentary piece in tomorrow's journal.
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- The survey, which was led by Brian Martinson of the HealthPartners
Research Foundation in Bloomington, questioned more than 3,200 scientists
around the country about a long list of questionable actions. They range
from outright fraud to improper relationships with research subjects.
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- Among the findings: 15 percent said they had changed
the design, methods or results of a study in response to pressure from
a financial sponsor.
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- Fewer than 1 percent admitted to "falsifying or
cooking research data." Slightly more, 1.4 percent, said they had
potentially improper relationships with students or subjects.
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- But significantly more -- 12.5 percent -- said they had
overlooked others scientists' use of flawed data or questionable interpretations.
And 7 percent admitted ignoring "minor" rules for protecting
human subjects. Six percent said that they failed to report data that contradicted
their previous work.
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- Martinson, a sociologist, said the fact that a third
of those surveyed admitted to one of the top ten violations suggests the
problem doesn't lie with a few "bad apples."
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- Scientists, he said, are "one of the hardest-working
groups of people that I know." But he said there may be something
about their working environment -- the mountains of rules, the pressure
to compete for grants and produce results -- that ends up compromising
their ethics.
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- "There's been this kind of idea that scientists...
are super-humans or something, that they're immune from these kinds of
pressure," he said. "But scientists are human."
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- He said this is the first survey of its kind, so it is
not known whether the misbehavior is more common now than in the past.
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- Copyright 2005 Star Tribune.
- http://www.startribune.com/stories/1556/5446438.html
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