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Policy

Forced fraud

May 8, 2006 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 84, Issue 19

Sophie Rovner quotes nature Editor-in-Chief Philip Campbell as saying "knowledgeable fraudsters can easily cover their tracks in a paper. Luckily, such people are very rare" (C&EN, Feb. 6, page 9). Although I believe that Campbell is correct that knowledgeable fraudsters can easily cover their tracks, his comment on the rarity of such people is more than naive. I suspect that all editors wish it were true, and perhaps it is for Earth-shattering discoveries.

Where do we draw the line? Is it fraud if only one column in Table 1 is fraudulent or if only one of 25 chemical analyses is reported fraudulently? What about the results that are not reported because they would cast doubts on the rest of the work?

A young researcher's manuscript is rejected for two years by four journals and 10 submissions because the results counter previously published literature. A reviewer of the first submission then repeats the work and publishes an article on the same topic. Is that fraud? The head of a university research center finds that several of its faculty members and students are publishing articles containing results that are based on incorrect analytical results. The faculty and administration are informed, but the revelations go ignored because a large grant is at stake. Is that fraud?

As research dollars are increasingly more difficult to obtain and more scientists and engineers are finding themselves forced to work outside their training and passions, the incentive to report research results that are questionable or manufactured—but unlikely to be discovered and on matters of little significance—seems to be small and not reporting them seems to be increasingly easy to justify.

As an expert witness in both state and federal courts over the past 18 years, I have been appalled by the comparison of research results contained in the files compared with results reported in journals. Thus, it is my opinion that until research dollars are dramatically increased, the overwhelming pressure to publish and obtain grants to support partial salaries and bloated university indirect costs will continue to force a level of fraud into research that was, perhaps, unheard of in the past. I fear that Campbell's conundrum is just the tip of the iceberg.

Ronald D. Jones
Portland, Ore.

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