---
title: "Scientific integrity"
chunk: 3/7
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_integrity"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:17:33.558998+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Taxonomy and classification ==
In codes of conduct, the definition of research integrity is usually negative: the collection of norms aims to single out different forms of unethical research and scientific misconduct with varying degrees of gravity.
The multiplication of codes of conduct has also corresponded with an expansion of scope. While the initial debate was focused on "three deadly sins of scientific and scholarly research: fabrication, falsification and plagiarism", attention has later shifted "to the lesser breaches of research integrity". In 1830, Charles Babbage introduced the first taxonomy of scientific frauds that already encover some forms of questionable research practices : hoaxing (a voluntary fraud "far from justifiable"), forging ("whereas the forger is one who, wishing to acquire a reputation for science, records observations which he has never made"), trimming (which "consists in clipping off little bits here and there from those observations which differ most in excess from the mean" and cooking. Cooking is the main focus of Babbage as an "art of various forms, the object of which is to give to ordinary observations the appearance and character of those of the highest degree of accuracy". It falls done under several sub-cases such as data selection ("if a hundred observations are made, the cook must be very unlucky if he cannot pick out fifty or twenty to do the serving up", model/algorithm selection ("another approved receipt (…) is to calculate them by two different formulae") or use of different constants.
In the late 20th century, this classification has been greatly expanded and have come to encompass a wider range of deficiencies than intentional frauds. The formalization of research integrity entailed a structural change in the vocabularies and the concept associated with it. By the end of the 1990s, use of the expression "scientific fraud" was discouraged in the United States, in favor a "semi-legal term": scientific misconducts. The scope of scientific misconducts is expansive: along with data fabrication, falsification and plagiarism it includes "other serious deviations" that are demonstrably done in bad faith. The associated concept of questional research practice, first incepted in a 1992 report of the Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, has an even broader scope, as it also encompass potentially non-intentional research failures (such as inadequacies in the research data management process). In 2016, a study identified as much as 34 questionable research practices or "degree of freedom", that can occur at all the steps of the project (the initial hypothesis, the design of the study, collection of the data, the analysis and the reporting).
After 2005, research integrity has been additionally redefined through the perspective of research reproducibility and, more specifically, of the "reproducibility crisis". Studies of reproducibility suggest that there is continuum between irreproducibility, questionable research practices and scientific misconducts: "Reproducibility is not just a scientific issue; it is also an ethical one. When scientists cannot reproduce a research result, they may suspect data fabrication or falsification." In this context, ethical debates are less focused on a few highly publicized scandals and more on the suspicion that the standard scientific process is broken and fails to meet its own standard.
Another type of risk to scientific integrity is reduced political diversity among scientists, which can lead to conformity and political bias.

== Current landscape and issues ==

=== Prevalence of ethical issues ===
In 2009, a meta-analysis of 18 surveys estimated that less than 2% of scientists "admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once". Real prevalence may be under-estimated due to self-reporting: regarding "the behaviour of colleagues admission rates were 14.12%". Questionable research practices are more widespread as more than one third of the respondents admit to have done it once. A large 2021 survey of 6,813 respondents in the Netherlands found significantly higher estimate, with 4% of the respondents engaging in data fabrication and more than half of the respondents engaging in questionable research practices. Higher rates can be either attributed to a deterioration of ethic norms or to "the increased awareness of research integrity in recent years". The higher rates of self-declared scientific misconducts are found in the medical and life science, with at much as 10.4% respondents surveyed in the Nerthelands admitting a scientific fraud (either fabrication of falsification of the data).
Other forms or scientific misconducts or questionable research practices are both less problematic and much more widespread. A 2012 survey of 2,000 psychologists found that "the percentage of respondents who have engaged in questionable practices was surprisingly high", especially in regard to selective reporting. A 2018 survey of 807 researchers in ecology an evolutionary biology showed that 64% "did not report results because they were not statistically significant", 42% have decided to collect additional data "after inspecting whether results were statistically significant" and 51% "reported an unexpected finding as though it had been hypothesised from the start". As they come from self-declared survey, these estimations are likely to be underestimated.