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out errors in experimental design, methodology, explanation, interpretation, and citations, help in
significantly improving a manuscript. A research paper should report original and significant findings
that are likely to be of interest to a broad spectrum of the journal’s readers. Papers that are well
organized and well written with clear statements regarding how the findings relate to understanding
of the subject will have high possibilities of getting accepted for publication. Papers should not be
very long. They should be concise and yet complete in presenting research findings (Kamat, op. cit.).
Research articles that report routine extensions of previous reports and those, which are poorly
organized with unnecessary or poor quality illustrations are generally not accepted for publication in
quality journals. Papers that violate ethical guidelines are also not publishable.

Ethical Violations

The main ethical violations that we see are (ibid.):

• Fabrication means making up, fabricating, data or results and reporting them in publications.
• Falsification is manipulating or falsifying research materials, equipment, data, results, etc.

• Plagiarism is the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without
giving appropriate credit to the person.

• Self-plagiarism is verbatim copying of one’s own research is also a violation of ethics.
Ethical violation in research is a global problem. Many researchers violate the code of ethical conduct
for easy publication, quick recognition, awards, greed for power, and so on. Duplication of research
articles is reported to be the highest in the United States followed by Japan, Germany, China, United
Kingdom, Italy, France, and Canada(Errami and Garner, 2008). Maximum duplication rate is found
in the field of medicine. Researchers who manipulate their data deceive others and violate the
basic values and widely accepted professional standards of science. They also fail to fulfil the three
obligations already mentioned.

Case Studies

Ethical violations cannot be hidden. Sooner or later they will get exposed. There are several examples
of ethical violations being reported. Some are discussed here. As a first case we take the example
of Nobel Laureate in medicine, Prof. David Baltimore who published a paper in the journal Cell
with title, “Altered repertoire of endogenous immunoglobulin gene expression in transgenic mice
containing a rearranged μ heavy chain gene” (Weaver, et al., 1986). When Morgot O’Toole (1991),
a researcher in the same laboratory, tried to reproduce their work, O’Toole could not reproduce the
same results and accused the corresponding author, Dr. Imanishi-Kari of fabricating the data In 1991,
Dr. Imanishi-Kari was accused of falsifying data and it was recommended that she be barred from
receiving research grants for 10 years. Several books have covered the Baltimore affair.

Jacques Benveniste, who gave the term “memory of water” claimed that water molecules somehow
retain a memory of the antibodies that they had previously been in contact with, so that a biological
effect remains when the antibodies are no longer present. This validated the claims made for highly
diluted homeopathic medicines. Other teams were subsequently unable to repeat the effect.

Jan Hendrik Schön, a German-born physicist, who was employed at Bell Laboratories, New Jersey,
was working on electronic materials in which conventional semiconducting elements were replaced
by crystalline organic molecules that he called molecular transistors. Schön claimed spectacular on/
off behaviour, far beyond anything achieved thus far with organic materials. His findings on molecular

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