Fudging or Fraud?

Where Research Misconduct becomes a Crime

The term “publish or perish” in academia describes the insidious dilemma that links professional recognition and awards to the publication of peer-reviewed research papers in journals. Competition for results can be cutthroat, and every delay in publication runs the risk that someone else will publish the results you’ve spent months or years achieving. Given that a track record of published articles is required for everything in academic life – from job applications to teaching appointments to grant funding – it is only human nature that academics would be tempted to bolster their track records.

The practices of research misconduct vary in their sophistication and scale. Individual researchers might falsify images of results or engage in statistical manipulation of surveys (including selective reporting and “p-hacking”, which aims to have results be statistically significant and therefore more notable or impressive). Grant applicants might add “ghost researchers” – academics with impressive publication histories but who will do no work on the grant – to improve their chances of success. Organisations might turn a blind eye to paper mills or predatory publishers, who churn out massive numbers of publications with little academic value.

Allegory of Avarice, or Fraud by Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert (from the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

In criminal law, fraud is generally defined as obtaining some kind of benefit through lying, deception, or manipulation. From that perspective, a researcher who wins a grant or a tenured position because of faked research is committing an act of fraud. Benefits derived by fraud do not necessarily need to be monetary, so those who publish fraudulent or manipulated results for general reputational “acclaim” are just as guilty. That raises an obvious but interesting question – why aren’t more researchers in front of judges for fraud-by-fudging?

The first answer is cultural. For some time, research misconduct has been considered an “administrative” or “disciplinary” problem; that is, researchers who do it might have breached a code of ethics or other acceptable standard of conduct, but are not criminally liable for their conduct. In many cases, papers are retracted or withdrawn, or a warning is added to suggest that the veracity of the research has been questioned. In others, the researchers involved resign their positions, avoiding the reputational or financial implications of their conduct.

The second answer to why researchers don’t face jail time is legal. Fraud prosecutions are incredibly complex, and that can be compounded in cases involving scientific research where the line between established facts, theories, and even educated guesses is razor-thin. In a lot of cases, it might be that the researcher involved simply doesn’t have “intent” to defraud; in other words, they did do something criminal to get a benefit, but they didn’t mean to gain or receive that benefit illegally. In other cases, police and law enforcement officials aren’t as technically qualified as the researchers they are investigating, making it hard for them to spot acts of fraud.

As a result, instances of criminal prosecution of researchers are few and far between (but they do exist):

• In Thailand, a government official was convicted of fraud in 2012 after plagiarising 80% of his PhD thesis, yet still kept his job in the National Innovation Agency;

• In the United States, former Assistant Professor Dong-Pyou Han at Iowa State University was jailed for five years in 2015 after he “spiked” samples of rabbit blood in an HIV vaccine study;

• In Australia, two doctors – Bruce Murdoch and Caroline Barwood of the University of Queensland – were convicted of fraud in 2016 after an investigation by the University (and later, the Crime and Corruption Commission) found that research on Parkinson’s disease reported in published articles by the pair had not occurred;

• Three researchers in China in 2019 were jailed after making illegal modifications to human embryos, which led to three genetically modified babies being born.

A third reason that research misconduct investigations take a long time to resolve, and are often internal to the university and completely confidential. For example, a psychology researcher at Harvard University, Marc Hauser, was originally accused of misconduct in 2007 – the report of his activities was not made public until 2011, and he was allowed to resign without penalty in 2012. Another researcher, Dipak K. Das of the University of Connecticut, was accused of misconduct in 2007. Five years later, a review board published a 60,000 page report alleging 145 instances of fabricated data, and used to support the termination of Das’ employment (though no criminal charges were laid).

So what can be done to fix the problem of scientific fraud being “everywhere”? Some have suggested that the best way to tackle these cultural deficits in research misconduct is to re-brand serious conduct as “research fraud”, thus calling the actions exactly what they are:

…fabrication, falsification or deception in performing or reporting research results. Research fraud deceives employers, funders, the research publishers and readership (and ultimately the general public) by attempting to publish research that is misleading, has been fabricated in some way, has not even been conducted in the first place or has already been published elsewhere.

This has led to a counter-argument being raised that a focus on “research fraud” runs the risk ‘of giving the false impression that dubious practices falling outside the legal regulation “do not count”’.

Some have also suggested that integrity investigations should be made public. In that vein, the growing field of “forensic scientometrics” (FoSci) has emerged as a discipline to counter research fraud. That field engages in ‘quantitative analysis of scientific publications and research outputs in this larger context’; in other words, looking for anomalies in scientific publications. Although it remains an emerging field, FoSci has the potential help investigators spot instances of fraud more easily.

Others have indicated that prosecutors and law enforcement should focus on data in investigations involving academia. Again, FoSci has the potential help these government bodies translate complex concepts into legally admissible evidence, as well as sorting through a vast number of data points for evidence of potential illegality.

Irrespective of the approaches taken, research fraud will continue to pose a problem for universities and the higher education sector as a whole. There is much to be said for the threat of potential criminal prosecution, given that it can shape researcher behaviour ex ante and appropriately punish malfeasance ex post. However, to best utilise that mechanism to encourage honesty and transparency in research, we need to develop a deeper understanding of research fraud, and that requires transparency, publicity and – dare we say it – a little bit of infamy.