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Published online 8 August 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.1015
Column: Muse
Crime and punishment in the lab
Before we ask whether scientific misconduct is dealt with harshly enough, says Philip Ball, we need to be clear about what punishment is meant to achieve.
Is science too soft on its miscreants? That could be read as the implication of a study published in Science this week1, which shows that 43% of a small sample of scientists found guilty of misconduct remained employed in academia, and half of them continued to turn out a paper a year.
Scientists have been doing a lot of hand-wringing recently about misconduct in their ranks.
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