To collaborate or not to collaborate?

You hear about these stories about how ideas from young scientists are stolen by more senior scientists. (The case of Rosalind Franklin’s discovery of the X-ray crystallographic photographs of DNA being a prime one.) Yet, it is always disconcerting to read more and more stories about how people with good scientific ideas are taken advantage […]

Most scientific paper retractions due to misconduct

Raw Story reports that “When a biomedical study is retracted, most of the time it is because of misconduct rather than error, a report published Monday said. Two-thirds of all retractions around the world stem from acts like fraud, suspected fraud or plagiarism, it added.” The relevant paper is the Fang et al. (2012). Fang, […]

Scientists Behaving Badly

Fabrication of data, plagiarism, theft, retraction, image duplication, destruction of property, and death. These are the results from the Top Science Scandals of 2011, as determined by The Scientist magazine. (Thanks to Dave Topping for pointing this out.)