Without Scientific Integrity, There Can Be No Evidence Base

Abstract

In a recent article published in Nature , Martinson and colleagues1 reported on a 2002 survey of scientific misconduct committed by mid-career and early-career scientists. The study drew national attention because it was the first to provide empirical evidence of the prevalence of scientific misconduct, using a large random sample taken from databases maintained by the National Institutes of Health's Office of Extramural Research. The encouraging news is that the prevalence of the most serious misconduct reported by scientists was low. For 6 of the top 10 misbehaviors—including falsification, plagiarism, failure to present contradictory data, and overlooking the flaws in another scientist's data—reported frequencies were under 2%. A disturbing finding, however, was that a third of responding scientists admitted in this anonymous survey that they had engaged in 1 or more of 10 behaviors that the authors of the study determined were potentially sanctionable deviations from accepted levels of scientific integrity. As with most survey studies, this investigation had several limitations that warrant caution in the interpretation of the findings. Low response rates and subsequent potential non-response bias were an obvious problem, with a response rate of 52% among the mid-career scientists and a rate of only 43% among the early-career group. Even more troubling—to me, at least—was the ambiguous wording of some of the survey questions. For example, 15.5% of the scientists admitted to “changing …

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