At a recent meeting, several colleagues raised the point that for whatever reason, new faculty members may not be as aware of what constitutes scientific misconduct as previous generations of professors. It seems that there are two clusters of the confused: 1) those for whom the US definition (and I’ll get to that in a bit) is obscure because they were trained in other countries where the “rules” may be different and 2) US trained faculty members who may be under the impression that the “rules” are somehow relaxed for less formal contributions (such as blogs).
The sense among my colleagues was that it is very important for both of the clusters that the word get out–scientific misconduct can get you very quickly into a whole lot of trouble.
So what constitutes scientific misconduct? It’s useful to remember the mnemonic FFP (fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism). Fabrication is the making up of experimental data. Falsification is the changing of experimental data. Plagiarism is the use of another person’s work (usually written) without giving them proper credit.
It’s never OK to do anything of these things.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 