What is Research Misconduct?

Appropriation of another person's ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit.

Plagiarism examples:

• Investigators, during the peer-review process, taking ideas from others' grant proposals or articles and including them in their own publications.
• Students taking material from the internet verbatim, without attribution, during write-ups of research or other scholarly work.
• Faculty taking dissertation material from students and including it in publications without giving due credit.

• When there is a significant departure from accepted practices of the relevant research community
• When a person committed the misconduct intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly
• When the allegation is proven by a preponderance of the evidence

• Disputes regarding honest error or good faith differences in interpretations or judgments of data
• Authorship disputes, such as complaints about the appropriate ranking of co-authors, unless the dispute constitutes plagiarism
• Sexual Harassment
• Misuse of funds (financial fraud)
• Gross negligence of persons in their professional duties
• Vandalism (including tampering with experiments and instructions)
• Violations of research responsibility (animals, DNA, human subjects)
• Whistle-blowing
• Cover-up of misconduct
• Malicious allegations

• Failing to retain significant research data for a reasonable period
• Maintaining inadequate research records, especially for results that are published or are relied on by others
• Conferring or requesting authorship on the basis of a specialized service or contribution that is not significantly related to the research reported in the paper
• Refusing to give peers reasonable access to unique research materials or data that could support published papers
• Using inappropriate statistical measurements, or other methods of measurement, to enhance the significance of research findings
• Inadequately supervising research subordinates or exploiting them
• Misrepresenting speculations as fact or releasing preliminary research results, especially in the public media, without providing sufficient data to allow peers to judge the validity of the results or to reproduce the experiments