1. Scientists behaving badly Nature - 9 June issue ~~~~~ B. Martinson, M. Anderson & R. de Vries ~~~~~

2. Definition ● Serious: fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism -> hurts one's career (Schön at Bell labs in 2002) ● Carelessness: misconduct -> challenges our privilege of self-regulation

3. The Experiment ● Anonymous e-mail survey randomly send to scientists from the National Institutes of Health ● Questions regarding behaviour in the last 3 years ● ~3000 replies ● Two groups of respondents: post-doc and faculty ● Two classes of questions: serious misbehaviour and carelessness

4. The Questions ● Failing to present data that contradict one's own previous research ● Overlooking other's use of flawed data or questionable interpretation of data ● Inappropriately assigning authorship credit ● Dropping observations or data points from analyses based on a gut feeling that they were inaccurate ● Inadequate record keeping related to research projects

5. The Results ● Less than 1.5% admitted to falsification or plagiarism ● 15.5% changed the design, methodology or results of a study because of funding source ● 27.5% reported inadequate record keeping ● Overall, 33% engaged in at least one of the 10 most serious offences ● Proportion higher in older group

6. Why? ● There is no historical study of misconducts in science ● Pressure to obtain results for fundings/jobs ● Danger of assessing quality of a scientist based on: - number of publications - publication rate (astro-ph)

7. What can we astronomers do? ● Acknowledge appropriately contributions (i.e. students, seniors...) ● As an author: make sure your work is reproducible. Up to date book keeping. ● As a referee/editor: prevent plagiarism and duplication ● Foster anonymity: for publications (referee and authors), for observational proposals?