---
title: "Scientific misconduct"
chunk: 5/6
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_misconduct"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:27:42.017412+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Regulatory violations and consequences ===
Title 10 Code of Federal Regulation (CFR) Part 50.5, Deliberate Misconduct of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) regulations, addresses the prohibition of certain activities by individual involved in NRC-licensed activities. 10 CFR 50.5 is designed to ensure the safety and integrity of nuclear operations. 10 CFR Part 50.9, Completeness and Accuracy of Information, focuses on the requirements for providing information and data to the NRC. The intent of 10 CFR 50.5 is to deter and penalize intentional wrongdoing (i.e., violations). 10 CFR 50.9 is crucial in maintaining transparency and reliability in the nuclear industry, which effectively emphasizes honesty and integrity in maintaining the safety and security of nuclear operations. Providing false or misleading information or data to the NRC is therefore a violation of 10 CFR 50.9.
Violation of any of these rules can lead to severe penalties, including termination, fines and criminal prosecution. It can also result in the revocation of licenses or certifications, thereby barring individuals or entities from participating in any NRC-licensed activities in the future.

=== Consequences for those who report misconduct ===
The potentially severe consequences for individuals who are found to have engaged in misconduct also reflect on the institutions that host or employ them and also on the participants in any peer review process that has allowed the publication of questionable research.  This means that a range of actors in any case may have a motivation to suppress any evidence or suggestion of misconduct.  Persons who expose such cases, commonly called whistleblowers, find themselves open to retaliation by a number of different means. These negative consequences for exposers of misconduct have driven the development of whistle blowers charters – designed to protect those who raise concerns.

== Incidence ==
The vast majority of cases of scientific misconduct may not be reported. The number of article retractions in 2022 was nearly 5,500, but Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, co-founders of Retraction Watch, estimate that at least 100,000 retractions should occur every year, with only about one in five being due to "honest error". One survey of researchers found that 29% of researchers reported misusing authorship at least once during their career, such as giving "gift authorship" to people who were not involved in the research.
A 2025 study by Northwestern university after reviewing aggregated data on the lists of deindexed journals from literature aggregators such as Web of Science, Scopus, Medline, data from Retraction Watch and PubPeer found that while the total number of research publications double every 15 years, articles from suspected research paper mills double every 1.5 years while the number of retracted articles double every 3.3 years and number of articles with PubPeer comments double every 3.6 years.
Recent work by Ilka Agricola and colleagues has for the first time systematically documented fraudulent practices in mathematical publishing and proposed concrete measures to address them. In "Fraudulent Publishing in the Mathematical Sciences," Agricola et al. analyze how predatory journals, paper mills, and citation cartels exploit bibliometric incentives, warning that unvetted "proofs" in low-quality outlets can mislead subsequent research. Published simultaneously on arXiv and in the October 2025 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, the report highlights alarming patterns—such as Clarivate's 2023 exclusion of mathematics from its Highly Cited Researchers list due to metric gaming—and traces the emergence of systematic fraud in a field previously thought immune to such issues. A follow-up paper, "How to Fight Fraudulent Publishing in the Mathematical Sciences," endorsed by the International Mathematical Union and International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, offers joint recommendations for researchers, institutions, and funders, including discouraging reliance on raw publication and citation counts, promoting expert peer review over bibliometrics, and using curated databases (e.g., zbMATH Open) to vet journals. Commenting on these findings, Agricola emphasized that "fraudulent publishing undermines trust in science and scientific results and therefore fuels antiscience movements".

== Notable cases ==

In 1998 Andrew Wakefield published a fraudulent research paper in The Lancet claiming links between the MMR vaccine, autism, and inflammatory bowel disease. In 2010, he was found guilty of dishonesty in his research and banned from medicine by the UK General Medical Council following an investigation by Brian Deer of the London Sunday Times.
The claims in Wakefield's paper were widely reported, leading to a sharp drop in vaccination rates in the UK and Ireland and outbreaks of mumps and measles. Promotion of the claimed link continues to fuel the anti-vaccination movement.
In 2011 Diederik Stapel, a highly regarded Dutch social psychologist, was discovered to have fabricated data in dozens of studies on human behaviour. He has been called "the biggest con man in academic science".
In 2020, Sapan Desai and his coauthors published two papers in the prestigious medical journals The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine, early in the COVID-19 pandemic. The papers were based on a very large dataset published by Surgisphere, a company owned by Desai. The dataset was exposed as a fabrication, and the papers were soon retracted.
In 2024, Eliezer Masliah, head of the Division of Neuroscience at the National Institute on Aging, was suspected of having manipulated and inappropriately reused images in over 100 scientific papers spanning several decades, including those that were used by the FDA to greenlight testing for the experimental drug prasinezumab as a treatment for Parkinson's.

== Proposed responses ==