Fraud and science.

Abstract

In the past decade fraud, cheating, forged experiments, and plagiarism have been discovered in fields ranging from biomedical research to psychometrics. Scientists have reacted by attempting to deny and minimize the problem. I believe that we should recognize that the phenomenon is not rare nor to be explained as a result of individual pathology. I look at some incidents in the history of science, give a taxonomy of fraud, and draw some morals about ways in which we might try to decrease the incidence of scientific fraud.