Questions tagged [research-misconduct]
On suspected or actual distortion of the research and/or research publication process through dishonest or otherwise unethical behavior. Includes (but is not limited to) issues such as fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, violation of ethical standards related to human subjects research, and theft of intellectual property.
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Is it wrong for students to report suspected / borderline plagiarism?
Last year I came across a student in our department (we are both PhD students) who copied a journal article in her final paper. To be sure, she didn’t copy the article word from word but did use the ...
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About Consent for publishing in conference
I'm a first year PhD student. I never have any record of publication or conference paper before.
In my PhD, I worked as a coauthor for the post doctoral fellow's paper. My post doc work 24x7 sundays ...
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Not included as an author in 2 publications [duplicate]
Tldr: I was not included as one of the authors of 2 papers. What to do?
History: Around 2.5 years ago I started a PhD. I was producing very good results and my supervisor was very happy because there ...
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Conflict about my authorship with former supervisor [duplicate]
For four years I worked in the laboratory of my former supervisor. For unknown reasons, she always mistreated me - I had the smallest salary in the laboratory (and when I once asked her why, she cut ...
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PhD supervisor with cases of scientific misconduct
I started my PhD with my present supervisor a couple of years back. Her profile looked interesting. However, suddenly her previous work started receiving comments on publicly available domains (...
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How can I report an author for using an unethical way of increasing citation in his work?
A professor of mine has been asking students to write research papers for conferences. I wrote a paper and submitted it to him, and he uploaded it in a conference through EasyChair.
While going ...
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Is this a form of plagiarism? [closed]
Recently, I had an author contact me regarding naming me as a consultant on a project of theirs, rather than co-author, if I was to contribute. No fee was discussed at all.
Was it a form of plagiarism ...
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Resources to read about plagiarism? [closed]
I am a 2nd semester masters student of a 1 year research degree in Europe.
I have completed a masters from my country and in my 4th semester, there was a thesis component. Actually, my thesis advisor ...
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Removing unreal/gift co-authors previously added because of academic bullying
Someone under my pastoral care asked me the following, wishing to remain anonymous: I had published several papers with my so-called supervisors before, during my PhD, both of whom never actually ...
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How should I investigate and respond to a potentially false claim of a publication in the CV of an applicant?
I was reviewing an application for a grant and found out that one of the applicants has included a publication on his CV that does not exist in the journal. It was supposedly published several years ...
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Are the ombudsman's decisions of German universities legally binding? [closed]
I was accused of academic and administrative misconduct by one of my students several months ago in Germany. Finally, it was proved that I was innocent and there was no wrong doing on my side.
Now, ...
user165967
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can anyone else submit my thesis behalf of me
I did an undergraduate thesis with my partner. It don't have any missed, wrong or theft information. I was ill and long away from my dorm that time. So I told my partner to print and submit it. He had ...
user164323
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Gift authorships and necessary actions
In my paper as well as in others there is a specific person that acquired gift authorships. How do I speak about that anonymously? Should I send an anonynous email to integrity office? or to the ...
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What can the community do about serial fraud by a conference attendee?
Some of my colleagues and I have become aware of an individual (name withheld) who makes a habit of attending math conferences on false pretences in order to get travel support.
I have second-hand ...
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When citing your own work on a grant application, is it acceptable to change the order of authors so that your name appears first?
I review a grant application. One of the applicants, Author B, has published an article in a high impact journal as joint first author with Author A (Author A is not in the grant application). In the ...
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My "in review" article appeared online on ResearchGate - uploaded by a reviewer
My team submitted an article to an MDPI journal 7 weeks ago. The manuscript quickly went into peer review. After a few weeks, MDPI contacted us and asked us to provide a list of potential reviewers. ...
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Are there any international standards, laws, or governing bodies that deal with allegations of plagiarism?
Consider a case of plagiarism like this one. The allegation in this case led to formal investigations, articles being retracted, and researchers being sanctioned.
Who is the responsible body for ...
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How long does it usually take for journals to resolve 'expressions of concern'?
The 'expression of concern' in question is this one. It says:
The journal and publisher have been alerted to concerns about this article, and an investigation is in progress. In the interim, we alert ...
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Not citing the methods in the grant proposal [closed]
Last year, I wrote a proposal for DFG, a German body funding, with my colleague and we got money to hire three PhD students on my side, and two on my colleague’s side in another university. In the ...
user154824
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Is it ethical to reconstruct a dataset without permission?
I have reached out to a researcher about using their dataset from a paper published 20+ years ago, but they have not responded to my email. There are a variety of reasons why they might have not ...
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What can I do when my coauthors submit a paper which uses our in-progress coauthored work?
Background:
My coauthors and I have been writing a paper together for quite some time. The project has not been the main focus of anyone in the group for the longest time, so it has been going very ...
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Does an institution commit misconduct if it gives a low-quality online course to its graduate students?
I'm a graduate student in Physics. The past semester was online due to the current situation. We had a particular course named "Workshop course" which is about the metal shop where usually ...
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Authorship of a student who published separately without permission
My co-authors and I are preparing to submit a manuscript and have a problem regarding authorship.
Several months ago, a grad student on the project became upset and quit. We just discovered that, ...
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Is data falsification in undergraduate courses bad?
I remember that I had a course in college called "Integration Project" and we had to do surveys, I went to the local mall to do surveys to people, everything fine. Then I discovered that my ...
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My PhD advisor sent me a plagiarized draft
While working on a paper, my PhD advisor (at a prestigious school, if that matters) sent revisions that included three pages plagiarized from a book. Thankfully I caught this before the paper was ...
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Are you allowed to do scientific research on a mental disorder, if you have said mental disorder, and it is not registered in the DSM-5?
I have symptoms of a mental health disorder not registered in the DSM-5 called 'maladaptive daydreaming disorder'. In order for this to be able to get into the DSM-5, more research needs to be done on ...
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What should I do if I find a mistake after I submitted the camera-ready paper?
I recently got one paper accepted. Then I added one paragraph given the reviewers' comments and run more experiments for this section. The problem is that I don't have much time to run the experiments ...
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Plagiarism and exclusion from a master's program?
I am an EU student studying for my MBA in Germany. I have been a top student throughout the year. However, my thesis (24% supposedly plagiarized text) and the last two assignments (55% and 56%) have ...
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Should I ask for my thesis to be cited?
I face the following problem:
I have done my Bachelor thesis at an organisation (in 2019), where I had a contact point (CP) who supplied me the data, did some brainstorming with me and read the final ...
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The dean of a faculty is forcing people to include his son's name in academic researches
This post does not include me, but recently, it came to the attention of many on a social media platform that a recently graduated doctor had made a claim that "the dean of faculty of medicine&...
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Ignoring referee reports [duplicate]
Let's consider the following situation:
Author A submits a paper to a journal. Referee B writes a critical referee report and recommends rejection. Author A then resubmits the same paper to another ...
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Research on gender and academic misconduct
In professor David Shanks' talk "Does social science tell the truth? (2016)" at 15:14 he claims that there is an apparent gender bias among his examples of people that have committed ...
user32966
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How to handle one's own academic misconduct, long after it occurred?
I got my PhD in data engineering in 2014 from a reputed university in a developed country. I am now an associate professor in a well-reputed university. Between my PhD and my current position, I took ...
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How to deal with force citations by organizers
I have seen organizers of different workshops in machine learning making it mandatory to cite their papers. This is totally fine if it is base paper or paper describing the dataset. But sometimes they ...
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What are indicators that someone has a ghost writer? [closed]
After reading about paper mills, and knowing that there are companies that offer ghostwriting for bachelor theses, at least in Switzerland and Germany, I asked myself if there are methods to detect ...
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Allegation of Academic Misconduct
I completed my dissertation a few weeks ago, and submitted it the night before it was due and thus did not check it on turnitin etc for similarity reports. However, on Friday night I received an e-...
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Is using synthetic datasets in sciences the same as using fake data? [closed]
Sometimes, there are good reasons to use synthetic data in research. In my case I am using data from Synthea, a program that simulated patient data including medications, names and addresses. I know ...
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Writing a commentary about a paper from a collaborator -- is it research misconduct?
I want to write a commentary (for a journal) about a paper a collaborator has published.
Is there a conflict of interest? Is it research misconduct if I write the commentary?
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I have egregiously sloppy (possibly falsified) data that I need to correct. How should I go about this?
Several years ago, I did a summer project as an undergrad with a PI not at my undergrad institution (I'm in grad school now). Now, the project is finished and he wants to publish it with data that I'...
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How does peer review detect cheating when replicating a study isn't an option? [duplicate]
Disclaimer: This is the third incarnation of my question because the previous two have met with silence.
Adapted to this site:
For a scientific study to be accepted as "truth" the standard ...
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What should one do with his/her manuscript after some sort of academic misconduct
This happened in my group. One of the master students in our group had a manuscript derived from her thesis, and the manuscript was planned to publish with she and her advisor (who is the PI of our ...
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Reviewing article and bad-faith citation
I did my PhD topic in mechanical engineering. A decade later, I agreed to review an article on the exact same topic, that has a great number of similarities with mine. OK, that can happen.
The authors ...
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Re-applying to medical school after misconduct
I am a nontraditional applicant for medical school and wanted to ask questions about my application here. I was previously enrolled in another MD program. I had an undiagnosed disability that resulted ...
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What to do if accused of cheating/misconduct at university? [closed]
This question is written to serve as a canonical question that is asked repeatedly on Academia.SE (see e.g., here, here, here, here, here, here and here.) The purpose of this question is to act as a ...
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How to prove episodes of academic misconduct?
My former PhD supervisor asked me different times to produce false results, including complete fabrication from scratch of otherwise non-existent results. I always managed to get away from that and I ...
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Submitting article to journal where I committed misconduct
I am interested in submitting an article to a journal that has previously identified misconduct from me. The misconduct occurred several years ago and was caused by a disability.
How should I proceed ...
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How should I respond to an offer to pay a bribe for authorship fraud?
I received an email:
I write this letter on behalf of authors seeking to co-publish. We have seen your previous works and they were considered to be of high quality. Therefore, I offer you a co-...
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Are there academic institution-specific equivalents to attorneys (a professional who assists in navigating conduct and justice systems)?
There's an interesting question over at Law.SE on the possibility of suing a university over what the OP saw as unfair disciplinary practices. I have often wondered...
Is there a type of professional ...
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What distinguishes acceptable use of a preprint server from unacceptable dual publication?
In answering this question, I wondered:
Many fields are now beginning to embrace preprint servers such as arXiv. Typically, authors upload a manuscript to the preprint server at the same time as they ...
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My advisor cited her colleague's papers in her own methodology even though she did not use those methods. Does this qualify as scientific misconduct?
I'm currently working on my MSc thesis under a PhD candidate's supervision. She has very recently published a paper as first author in a well-known journal where she claims to have followed ...
user129953