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Whatsapp Research misconduct often has multiple elements: data fraud, plagiarism and the exploitation of the work of others.

In recent decades, the scientific world has been shaken by several cases of scholarly misconduct, including fabricated results and plagiarism, resulting in the withdrawal of major papers from high-profile journals. How can science identify and stop the fraudsters? Ian Freckleton QC takes a look.

Jan Hendrik Schön was a researcher in condensed matter physics and nanotechnology. He received his PhD from the University of Konstanz in 1997, and was employed by Bell Laboratories, the institution that had done much of the work toward the invention of the first laser.

Schön's research was into the transformation of the properties of materials by the application of an electric field. He built high-performance transistors not from the usual silicon, but from the semi-conductor copper gallium selenide (CGS).

The unpalatable truth is that the check and balance of peer review has repeatedly been shown to be ineffectual, and has been subverted and circumvented.

He described what he maintained was the world's first organic electrical laser, and the first ever light-emitting transistor. In 2001, he claimed to have built the world's smallest transistor by wiring up a single molecule, as well as having used a thin layer of organic dye molecules to assemble an electronic circuit when acted on by an electric current.

These experiments placed Schön at the forefront of international nanotechnology research. The potential of his work was enormous; it raised the possibility of a movement away from silicon-based electronics to organic electronics, allowing a dramatic reduction in the size of chips.

In 2001, Schön was publishing a new research paper every eight days. This included a series of studies in both Nature and Science that promised to transform nanotechnology. Then clouds began to gather.

Professor Lydia Sohn of Princeton University and Professor Paul McEuen of Cornell University expressed concern about anomalies in Schön's research, including what they suggested was his use of duplicate data. Under pressure, Bell Laboratories appointed a formal committee chaired by Professor Malcolm Beasley of Stanford University to conduct an investigation.

One of its first acts was to request Schön to supply his raw data. He maintained, however, that he could not do so, as he had not kept his laboratory notes and that his data files had been deleted from his computer. He also maintained that his experimental samples had been discarded or were not available for examination.

The committee found Schön to have engaged in 16 instances of fraud. It concluded that he had substituted, manipulated and fabricated data sets. Schön admitted only to having made 'mistakes'. In 2004 the University of Konstanz revoked his doctoral degree. Schön took his grievances to the courts, at first successfully. He lost on appeal.

The case of Diederik Stapel

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Whatsapp A video of Diederik Stapel reading a statement about his fraud.

Then there was social psychology professor Diederik Stapel, from the Netherlands. He was one of the most prominent scholars in the psychology world. His publications were lively and tendentious. They dealt with racism, the social effects of eating meat and a range of current social issues. He received multiple grants and prestigious awards for his scholarship.

However, in 2011 three young researchers reported their suspicions of data falsification by Stapel. Previously, others had described his data as 'too good to be true'. After an exhaustive investigation of his published work, a committee made up of representatives of the three universities where Stapel had held positions concluded that the researcher's fraud extended to no fewer than 55 publications between 1996 and 2011.

The committee found that Stapel had manipulated data and on other occasions created his own data sets. It observed that great harm had been occasioned by Stapel's fraud; individuals had been demoralised and stigmatised by their association with him, and the faculties and the universities where he worked had their international reputations harmed.

Fraud was also found in chapters of his doctoral dissertation, which had been awarded by the University of Amsterdam. It was withdrawn.

The committee identified deficiencies in processes for enforcing standards of scientific integrity and an absence of a culture of transparency, peer review and assumption of joint responsibility. There had been a naïve delegation of trust, and a failure of checks and balances. Stapel's charismatic personality, influence and ability to draw lucrative grants meant he had escaped proper accountability.

In 2015, Stapel published a fascinating book, The Derailment, in which he described how he had yielded to the temptation to engage in intellectual dishonesty, as well as how easy it had been to get away with.

'When I started to fake my studies, it was very, very easy,' he wrote. 'I was always alone. Nobody checked my work; everyone trusted me … I didn't feel anything: no disgust, no shame, no regrets … I was a magician. I created my own reality, and everyone thought it was real ... I was pretty good at the technical aspects of my work, which made it easy to hide what I was doing with smoke and mirrors. The research I did was never too extreme, too weird, too flashy. It was usually completely logical.'

Haruko Obokata's faulty methodology

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Whatsapp Haruko Obokata makes a tearful apology at a press conference in 2014. She says she made mistakes but her results are still valid.

Finally, there is the case of Haruko Obokata. She was a scientist employed at the Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Japan. She had worked at Harvard Medical School and held a doctorate from Waseda University. She worked on the development of cells relevant to regenerative medicine and in 2014 published two papers in Nature, suggesting that stem cells could be created from a bacterial toxin or a weak acid bath.

The potential for her research was the creation of highly versatile cells that could heal damaged organs, repair spinal cords and treat neuro-degenerative diseases. Her work was hailed as having Nobel Prize-winning potential, and she was held up as forging a path for young female scientists in Japan. She took on celebrity status and even resided at a luxury hotel.

However, resentment and suspicion grew about Obokata. Some had suspicions that her methodologies were defective. For instance, concern was expressed about a genome analysis in one of her studies that appeared to have been spliced together from images of two placentas from two different experiments that looked almost the same. Images in her articles appeared to have been duplicated from her 2011 thesis, even though they related to different experiments.

Moreover, attempts to reproduce her findings failed completely. An inquiry was constituted and the resultant report denounced the quality her laboratory notes and found she lacked not only a sense of research ethics, but also the integrity and humility befitting a scientific researcher. No one could reproduce her findings. Her articles in Nature were retracted.

Obokata's response was defiant. She rejected the findings of tampering, fabrication and plagiarism. Her supervisor committed suicide, and her colleagues' work was thrust into the spotlight. The Riken Center's funding was slashed.

Next, an investigation was undertaken into Obokata's doctoral dissertation. It too was removed on the basis that she had engaged in multiple instances of plagiarism. She resigned from Riken and wrote a book entitled That Day, maintaining that one of her co-researchers was partly responsible for what had occurred and blaming pressure from the media for her inability to replicate her results.

What we can learn from fraudulent scientists

It is very important to be careful about drawing conclusions from so limited a sample as three cases, but there are some important observations that can be made in relation to the conduct of Schön, Stapel and Obokata.

At one level, these three cases represent instances of self-correcting science, in which the outcomes of investigations into whistleblowers concerns result in defective research being exposed. This sounds encouraging, but so much damage is done along the way.

Often individuals who engage in scientific fraud are high achievers. They are prominent in their disciplines but seek to be even more recognised for the pre-eminence of their scholarly contributions. Along with their drive for recognition can come charisma and grandiosity, as well as a craving for the limelight. Their productivity can border on the manic. Their narcissism will often result in a refusal to accept the manifest dishonesty and culpability of their conduct. The rationalising and self-justifying books of Stapel and Obokata are examples of this phenomenon.

When criticism is made or doubts are expressed about their work, these scientists often react aggressively. They may threaten whistleblowers or attempt to displace responsibility for their conduct onto others. Such cases can generate persistent challenges in the courts, as the scientists in question deny any form of impropriety.

These fraudulent scientists often use the collaboration of others, including across institutions, to blur the lines of responsibility and make it difficult to identify who has generated particular components of research and whether there has been proper authorisation by relevant ethics committees.

The many victims of misconduct

Research misconduct often has multiple elements: data fraud, plagiarism and the exploitation of the work of others. People rarely engage in such conduct as a one-off and frequently engage in multiple forms of such dishonesty, until finally they are exposed.

This intellectual dishonesty damages colleagues, institutions, patients who receive suspect treatments, trajectories of research and confidence in scholarship.

It challenges institutions because those responsible for scientific fraud are often stars in the scholarly firmament and high earners of research funding. They put institutions, be they university departments or research laboratories, on the scholarly map and keep them there.

Exposing their misconduct risks the status of the whole institution and its commercial viability. It's hardly surprising then that accusations and revelations of such misconduct are often unwelcome, and that too many times the blowtorch of scrutiny is turned on the whistleblower rather than the perpetrator.

Research misconduct generally matters most when it reaches the point of publication. Multiple instances of research fraud have been revealed in recent years, resulting in an unparalleled number of retractions in high profile and reputable journals.

We must do better

The unpalatable truth is that the check and balance of peer review has repeatedly been shown to be ineffectual, and has been subverted and circumvented. We need to do better if we are to reduce the extent of the phenomenon of fraudulent research.

Access to data needs to be much more open and unpreparedness to grant such access should be viewed in a sinister or at least unsatisfactory light. We need receptive, fair and prompt processes for when other scholars raise concerns about the work of colleagues.

The extent of misconduct in scientific research, difficult to measure as it is, highlights the need for changes to the culture of scientific publishing, the supervision of researchers and the conduct of collaborative research.

It is inevitable that the law will play a role in such matters, at least by way of providing a mechanism for appeal, but it may be that prosecuting those who have fraudulently obtained funding will become more of an option.

High-profile jail sentences for fraudulent scientists have sent salutary shock waves through science and medicine over the past decade. Professor Bruce Murdoch of the University of Queensland was given a suspended sentence in early 2016 in respect to fabricated research about Parkinson's disease.

However, Schön, Stapel and Obokata were never charged. For science, the challenge is to acknowledge the problem of fraud, understand the profiles and motives of the people who engage in it, take assertive steps to discourage it, and take active measures to reinstitute a culture of scholarly integrity.

Listen to the full talk Intellectual dishonesty is a blight on contemporary scholarly endeavour, argues Ian Freckleton QC.

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