Scientific misconduct Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Scientific misconduct - Essay Example on the other hand, refers to manipulating research equipment, materials, or processes or omitting (changing) results or data such that the study is not correctly represented in the records. Plagiarism is the stealing of another individual’s processes, ideas, words or results without giving proper credit. Scientific misconduct has dire consequences (Broad & Wade, 1982). It can ruin careers of researchers who knowingly write publications based on false research. If this is done by clinical researchers, some patients may suffer due to the wrong information on different types of treatment. A proper example is an article on fraud by Lancet published in Wakefield et al. (1999) (Koocher & Keith 2010). It linked a vaccine against measles, mumps, and rubella to autism. This caused a massive drop in vaccinations that could have resulted in several deaths, in children who were not protected. Falsification also does delay scientific progress especially when researchers misuse research funds, as well as waste time, following false research. A case in point is false claims by physicist Jan Hendrik Schon that he had built high performance plastic transistors, plus the world’s organic laser. This resulted in several laboratories wasting resources and years trying to duplicate his findings (Koocher & Keith 2010). Scientific misconduct ruins the image of the field in which the falsified research is carried out. It diminishes faith in science. Unfortunately, concrete information on the escalating cases of fabrication or falsifying of research in science is not available. The only estimate of the rise in research misconduct is a survey by Koocher & Keith (2010). According to the findings, approximately 1.5% of all research done annually is false. Out of the 155,000 researchers supplied by the National Institution of Health (NIH) funding, there were 2,335 incidents of poss ible misconduct yearly, sixty percent of them involving falsification or fabrication of data. It is worth