Scientific Misconduct - Motivation To Commit Scientific Misconduct

Motivation To Commit Scientific Misconduct

According to David Goodstein of Caltech, there are motivators for scientists to commit misconduct, which are briefly summarised here.

Career pressure

Science is still a very strongly career-driven discipline. Scientists depend on a good reputation to receive ongoing support and funding, and a good reputation relies largely on the publication of high-profile scientific papers. Hence, there is a strong imperative to "publish or perish". Clearly, this may motivate desperate (or fame-hungry) scientists to fabricate results.

To this category may also be added a paranoia that there are other scientists out there who are close to success in the same experiment, which puts extra pressure on being the first one. It is suggested as a cause of the fraud of Hwang Woo-Suk. A main source of detection comes when other research teams in fact fail or get different results.

Ease of fabrication

In many scientific fields, results are often difficult to reproduce accurately, being obscured by noise, artifacts, and other extraneous data. That means that even if a scientist does falsify data, he can expect to get away with it – or at least claim innocence if his results conflict with others in the same field. There are no "scientific police" who are trained to fight scientific crimes; all investigations are made by experts in science but amateurs in dealing with criminals. It is relatively easy to cheat although difficult to know exactly how many scientists fabricate data.