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Fabrication and falsification refer to not being totally honest in trying to find answers. Researchers
may, for reasons that are guessed to be attempts to get recognition or rewards, not be honest while
conducting the experimental or theoretical investigation central to the research, or may conduct the
investigation honestly but be unethical during its analyses.
Plagiarism is when the researchers were honest in both these stages of the research project but became
unethical while writing their research output. In plagiarism the researchers are, in the paper they
have written, claiming credit for the contributions of others and not giving credit where it is due,
attempting to steal the credit due of others.

Young researchers need to realize that the research community takes such unethical behaviour very
seriously. There is growing effort to impose penalties on the perpetrators, and penalties are even being
imposed ex-post-facto. The published research papers are open to scrutiny for posterity, and social
media will highlight the allegations pertaining to unethical behaviour in old, published work only
when the researchers achieve prominence later in life (Chaddah, 2018). Going by the increasing effort
to impose penalties, young researchers must be conscious that the existing penalties may become even
more severe as time progresses, and follow abundant caution.

Fabrication And Falsification

Fabrication and falsification mean not being totally honest in trying to find answers. Researchers
may, for reasons that are guessed to be attempts to get recognition or rewards, not be honest while
conducting experimental or theoretical investigation central to the research, or may conduct the
investigation honestly but be unethical during its analyses. Fabrication is the act of concocting
results, of reporting observations that were never made, of inventing something in order to deceive.
Falsification is to alter (information, data, a document, or evidence) so as to mislead. It is the fudging
of results, or of conveniently omitting the data that will not allow one to reach the conclusions being
presented. These two are misdemeanours that distort the research work done during research, in that
the paper is written showing results that do not exist, or not showing results that exist but would not
allow the paper to be accepted with the conclusions that it draws.

Fabrication and falsification of data amount to fraud and cheating. Researchers, who read such
concocted research papers, waste their time when they try to follow up on it. A researcher who
proposes new research believing this paper, or tries to use these conclusions (which are clearly not
valid), despairs when he or she finds out that the paper was fraudulent. The authors of the errant
research paper are clearly identifiable perpetrators of the fraud. The victims of the fraud are anyone
who believes the results of the paper, and could be many whose suffering will be hard to prove or
establish. Unfortunately, the victims are not clearly identifiable. We shall discuss in the next section
that plagiarism also has clearly identified perpetrators in the authors of the errant research paper, but
the victims in that case are also clearly identifiable as the authors of the work that is being plagiarized,
and whose credit is being stolen.
We must understand why fabrication and falsification are not immediately caught on submission of
a research paper. When a research paper is submitted to a journal for publication, the anonymous
referee (or reviewer) is not expected to repeat the entire experiment or redo the whole calculation.
The anonymous referee will not reproduce the research to validate it; referees cannot invest that much
effort, and no editors can give the referees that much time!

In a discussion published in Physics Today almost two decades back, Levi (2002) stated that “Referees
need to assume that the authors are operating in good faith. Once you admit the possibility of

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