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CHAPTER 3

Ethics in Research Publications: Fabrication, Falsification,

and Plagiarism in Science

Praveen Chaddah

Introduction

The purpose of research is to add to human knowledge, and to create new knowledge. Research adds
to human knowledge by addressing questions that are well-posed, and then trying to honestly find
answers. The answers that researchers find are published (or disseminated) in a medium that experts,
and students, will read sometime in the future. Publishing these results makes them available now, and
for the future. But before these results are published, a few experts (known as referees or reviewers)
will try to verify and validate them in, what is usually, an anonymous review process. Validation is
necessary before our research output adds to human knowledge.
It can be that someone, somewhere, already knows the answer and the researchers (authors of the
paper submitted) were simply unable to search out that answer. This certification of novelty of our
results, with reference to existing human knowledge, is one of the primary roles of the reviewers
(or referees). The referees also perform checks to ascertain that the procedure that the authors have
followed to obtain the answer has no flaws. The flaws can be artifacts that invalidate our experiment
or theoretical work, errors in logic, or mistakes in data analysis. The flaws are usually honest,
unintentional, and classified as honest mistakes.

In some rare cases, whose number has been unfortunately increasing recently, such flaws are
intentional, and amount to research misconduct.

Research Misconduct

Fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism (usually referred to as FFP) are three ethical issues
characterized as research misconduct. The first two refer to misdemeanours during research,
and the third refers to misconduct during the publication or dissemination process. All three are
considered in one category because research is incomplete unless it is disseminated. Fabrication
and falsification of data amount to fraud, and will result in some of the researchers, who read this
concocted research, wasting their time if they try to follow up on it. Plagiarism is a more commonly
discussed misdemeanour because there is a perpetrator of the misdemeanour, and there is also a
clearly identifiable victim in the researcher whose work is being plagiarized and whose credit is
being stolen. Fabrication and falsification are fraud, while plagiarism is theft of the victim’s credit.
My dictum to combating plagiarism is, “one should be neither a perpetrator, nor a victim, of
plagiarism.”
Such unethical behaviour is different from the behaviour involving the living subjects of a research
process, encountered in life-sciences or social-sciences. The latter could involve violating the rights of
human subjects, of animal rights, running the risk of mutating biological cells, etc. and is outside the
scope of this Chapter.

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