Questions tagged [research-misconduct]
On suspected or actual distortion of the research and/or research publication process through dishonest or otherwise unethical behavior. Includes (but is not limited to) issues such as fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, violation of ethical standards related to human subjects research, and theft of intellectual property.
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How do I deal with a supervisor who wants to replace bioinformatics expertise with ChatGPT, especially when it comes to publishing?
My PhD supervisor who is exclusively wet-lab (in plant genetics) has recently started running scripts that ChatGPT has written for him (he has no experience whatsoever in bioinformatics, based on what ...
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What to do if a journal is unable/unwilling to resolve a potential case of plagiarism?
A well-known author recently published an article—submitted in March 2025 and published in June 2025—that relied on core ideas from my preprint, which was publicly available in February 2025.
In his ...
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I found academic misconduct in a paper I co-authored, should I report it?
I am the third author of a peer-reviewed journal article because of some contribution in writing and revising the paper. Recently, I found most of the research work in this paper was done by a ...
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Germany: Is complaining to the Kultusministerium about academic misconduct a good idea/effective?
I was a PhD student at a German university for a couple of years, and my contract was not renewed by my supervisor. Initially, we had a good relationship and published a paper together. In this paper, ...
user237530
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Being removed from acknowledgements despite contributing to the paper
(I'm an academic in the applied mathematics (PDEs) community in Europe).
Last year I had many discussions with a colleague of mine (call him X) which helped him in creating the results that went into ...
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Not comfortable sharing original ideas with my advisor, yet I need to have them in my thesis. What to do?
I've had multiple experiences that made me suspect my advisor might be involved in academic misconduct, particularly by taking ideas from my drafts or inspirations and passing them to other PhD ...
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What are advantages and disadvantages of transferring a #MeToo or similar approach to academic power abuse? [closed]
As also mentioned in this recent Nature article, academia can sometimes involve cases of power abuse, especially affecting graduate students and researchers with limited power and strong dependency on ...
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Proposed model already available in literature
I recently discovered a couple of papers from 2010-2011 that happen to propose the same model structure I proposed during my PhD and from which I published a couple of papers (2019-2022). At the time, ...
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How to handle exclusion from authorship after substantial contribution to a collaborative research project?
I’m looking for advice on how to deal with an authorship dispute involving a recent collaborative research project in structural biology.
Last year, I was invited by a postdoctoral researcher from ...
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Are there ever any consequences for gift authorship?
Gift authorship seems to be a pervasive issue and is considered academic misconduct, however, it is considered lower on the totem pole compared to plagiarism, data falsification and fabrication, etc. ...
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When are duplicates scientific error and when are they misconduct?
In a researcher's paper, they reported on two datasets with small sample sizes (n = 30-38). I found two duplicates in two two datasets, so a total of four. Seems like an innocuous issue that can ...
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Is Misrepresenting Cohort Differences Research Misconduct?
I have a question about research practices when assessing longitudinal growth.
Let's say you have a pre and post-test assessing students on certain topics. In your report you say (n = 30) and that ...
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Is it necessary to report a researcher if you are sure of academic misconduct?
Today, I was casually browsing through articles and got extremely surprised by the quality of one article. What I noticed first was that all figure panels were messy, figure legends were nonsense, and ...
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Were there consequences for the reviewers or editors of Andrew Wakefield's MMR/Autism paper? [closed]
Did the reviewers of Andrew Wakefield's MMR/Autism paper suffer any consequences (for not being thorough enough)? What about the editor(s) of the Lancet?
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Do authors publish how they calculate/results of their reliability tests? [closed]
I am in political science.
I was a research assistant and contributed to a project as a coder, but not much else. I wasn't too impressed with the project, I coded stuff but there was no way this would ...
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