Introduction to Research Frauds

Definition

The term Research Fraud (RF) refers to “the activities which may or may not be illegal, but are always immoral”

Research fraud is characterized as a deliberate attempt to deceive, going well beyond carelessness, incompetence or bad practice. The greatest concerns are data falsification and fabrication, that is, making up and changing (or removing) data values.

Types of Research Frauds

There are two main types of research fraud as mentioned below:

1-Negligence

• This first category may be classified as scientific negligence.
• The negligence in research has an impact on the results of the reviewer and reader as the researcher provides erroneous information unintentionally, due to which the public and reviewers are mistaken, fooled or deceived.
• It may be caused because the scientist may not have an accurate or sound idea of any assumption he has made in his research.

2-Deliberate Dishonesty

• The second category of research fraud involves the intentional attempt by a researcher to be fraudulent by acts of fraud that may include forged or fabricated data, plagiarism, falsified results, piracy, hoaxes and other such fraudulent activities.
• These activities are unacceptable even if performed to a very small extent because e.g., even a 0.01% change in any value can result in a strong positive increase in results.
• Research papers of researchers often get rejected by progressing journals if this category is detected in their research.

Further Types:

The U.S. National Science Foundation defines three types of research fraud concerning the researcher or scientist conducting the research fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism.

Fabrication:

• Fabrication means constructing the results of any research activity like an experiment or survey without actually conducting the research activity and presenting those results in the research paper as to be genuine.
• This is sometimes referred to as outright manufacturing of experimental data.
• Another appearance of fabrication is in the attitude that references are included from sources in favour of a research postulate/hypothesis/argument.
• However, those references do not support the postulate/hypothesis/argument and/or are fake. These references are included to give a perception of common acceptance of the postulate/hypothesis/argument.

Falsification:

• Falsification means that the research activity like experiments or surveys has been conducted but the results are changed (slightly or considerably) to have a positive impact on the postulate/hypothesis/argument, whereas, actually it was not.
• Moreover, this term is also used if the research materials, equipment or processes are also influenced. For example, if a researcher performs an experiment and his results are 70% accurate but he shows that his results are 75% which is better than the previous method whose results were 72%.

Plagiarism:

• Plagiarism is when a scientist or researcher includes the idea, text, hypothesis, process or results of another researcher without giving the appropriate credit to that researcher.
• Another type is when a researcher gets the idea/hypothesis from one researcher’s work and the results from another researcher’s work and presents and publishes it as all the work, processes and experiments have been performed by him.
• A breaking up of plagiarism is citation plagiarism which means determined or undetermined failure in appropriately crediting the original discoverers or resolvers, to give an unjustified impression of priority.

Fake Co-Authorship

• Fake Co-Authorship is when a researcher includes the names of his friends in a research paper even if they do not have any contribution to that research work.
• They sometimes do it on an alternative basis that A puts the name of B in his paper and B puts A’s name.
• This is especially the problem in underdeveloped countries where research ethics have not yet got strong and people do not care much about right and wrong.

Research Publishing Frauds

• The RFs we talked about above were individual misdeeds but there are RFs which may influence many researchers at a time when journals and conferences are publishing research without proper peer review.
• The category of deliberate dishonesty is not only associated with researchers but also with the journals /conferences publishing the articles.
• The journals use different methods to increase their impact factor such as forced self-citations. The impact factor is a measure of the number of citations in the last year. It is calculated by dividing the number of current citations a journal receives to articles published in the two previous years by the number of articles published in those same years.

Different Ways to Increase Impact Factors:

The different ways used by the journals to increase their impact factor are:

• Self Citation is the method by which journals request the researchers, who want to publish their research material, to include references from research papers published in their journal.
• Group Citation is the method by which journals request the researchers, who want to publish their research material, to include references from research papers published in their group of journals.
• Ungrouped Citation is the method in which journals request the researchers, who want to publish their research material, to include references from research papers published in certain journals which are not marketed as a group but are a group.
• Almost 90% of journals are free to publish but a few journals ask for a handsome amount of money such as more than 100 USD 1000 USD to publish a paper.
• They usually accept papers within a month and ask the researcher to submit a publishing fee.
• They also most of the time do not perform the process of peer review. They simply made some 4-5 sets of comments which they randomly sent to researchers to revise the paper and resubmit in a week or a month.
• But mostly they accept paper after submission without any revisions.
• Unfortunately, some journals of this type also have an impact factor which brings fake researchers publishing in these types of journals competitors with real researchers, especially in underdeveloped countries where the people publishing in money-based journals have strong groups to support their immoral acts.
• Not only the journals, but conferences are also fraudulent.
• They call for papers and accept almost all the papers which are submitted to them and ask to submit a handsome amount for registration.
• Later, the conference may not produce the desired results for the researchers. Even it may happen that the conference does not take place. All these types of frauds lie in the deliberate dishonesty category.

Reasons

• There may be many reasons for RF which may also be multidimensional.
• The main reasons are competition to publish the research material in high-impact factor journals, career growth, money, anxiety, pressure and enmity. Publishing in high-impact factor journals, of course, has an impact on the status of the researcher.
• Moreover, it is helpful in career growth and consequently helps in earning more money. Moreover, the researcher gets involved in research fraud due to the pressure of publishing the material before any other possible research on the same postulate.

Considering the perspective of journals and conferences to be involved in fraudulent activities two main points evolve. One is the progress of journals/conferences and the second is money again. Of course, money is a very important factor for which the journals and conferences use deliberate dishonesty.

Precautions

• Researchers and scientists must take the initiative to discourage fraudulent activities.
• For this purpose, universities, colleges and international organizations involved in policing scientific materials should play their roles.
• The researchers and scientists should conduct their research in favour of science to produce value addition to the work and not to produce faulty science.
• They must consider high standards and honesty in their research and publishing material.
• The community demands that sincere and honest research must have a good edge over fraudulent research.
• The institutes must provide an environment where fraudulent activities are discouraged and strongly promote integrity.
• Policies and procedures must be enforced to deal with evidence of fraud.
• Moreover, the environment must be progressive and not offensive for genuine researchers. An atmosphere must be created which must not discourage openness and creativity.

Conclusions

If the researchers, scientists and enforcement organizations for genuine research do not play their role for honesty, clarity and creativity then the results will be reflected in the community. The community will start adopting this ideology that the research ethics have been devolved and no more actual research is in the academia, but only frauds.

We must recognize that good science resembles art more than it resembles the law, accounting, or government. If scientific research is beset with paperwork and regulation, much of the joy and creativity in doing science could disappear, impeding scientific progress and making our field much less attractive to the dedicated and talented young researchers who represent the future.