Scientific misconduct, like many phenomena in physics, occurs on a number of different levels. Examples range from minor "peccadillos", such as sloppy refereeing, to major cases of blatant fraud. The physics community once considered itself free from such misconduct, but that is no longer the case. Last year two physicists in the US paid the ultimate price for scientific misconduct when they were fired from permanent positions at prestigious institutions for fabricating data, while the Indian physics community was rocked by an example of blatant plagiarism.
Fabrication, plagiarism and a range of other offences – duplicate submissions, conflicts of interest and referee misconduct – were among the topics discussed at a recent workshop on scientific misconduct organized by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). Failure to cite the work of others adequately is also an offence, so I should point out that many of the presentations and discussions at the workshop have informed this article.
The task currently facing the IUPAP working group on communication in physics is to formulate a list of guidelines and recommendations aimed at publishers, journals, editors, authors, referees, learned societies, funding agencies and research institutions. Dealing with misconduct is currently a time-consuming and at times haphazard affair: a clear definition of what actually constitutes the various types of misconduct and clear procedures for investigating misconduct when it is suspected would be of great benefit to the physics community.
One area where individual physicists could take the lead is the issue of co-authorship. There are two basic classes of misconduct here: improper exclusion and improper inclusion. Improper exclusion – when someone who should appear as a co-author does not – is the more difficult to tackle. Greater awareness of the problem and reliable mechanisms for journals to ensure that authors who have been improperly excluded receive belated credit would help. Moreover, institutions and senior physicists have a duty to ensure that such exclusion does not happen.
Improper inclusion comes in different forms: a senior researcher can, for instance, insist that their name is added to a paper, even though their contribution has not been significant. In an ideal world the physicists who do this would settle for a “thank you” in the acknowledgements (e.g. for raising the funds). Journals could also ask the authors to explicitly state who did what in the acknowledgements.
Improper inclusion can also occur when a junior author offers “gift authorship” to a senior colleague. Again the solution would be simple in an ideal world: the junior scientist would resist the impulse or pressure to offer gift authorship, and the senior colleague would decline. In practice, physicists would be more reluctant to accept gift authorship if they had heard the editor of the British Medical Journal tell the IUPAP workshop how the careers of several distinguished medical professors were effectively ended when they accepted gift authorship on papers that turned out to contain fabricated results.
Meanwhile, some authors include established physicists as co-authors to help their paper through the peer-review process, even though the unwitting co-author knows absolutely nothing about the paper. If journals routinely sent acknowledgements to all the authors on a paper, it would help to flush out such behaviour.
Publishers might argue that sending acknowledgments to all authors will make running a journal even more complicated than it is already. Senior physicists, meanwhile, might resent having their name on fewer papers or having to spend more time negotiating who appears on the author list. However, for as long as we do not know the full extent of scientific misconduct in physics, the whole community will have to suffer slightly more paperwork. No-one is suggesting that misconduct is rife in physics, but just one more major case of fabrication or plagiarism would be very bad news for our subject.
