Nature Medicine12, 490 (2006)
Published online: 27 April 2006; | doi:10.1038/nm0506-490a
Your cheatin' heart
David Cyranoski
Tokyo
What makes a scientist deceive?
Faked data, fudged numbers, filched ideas: how common in science are these grave sins? There may only be a handful of cases where scientists managed to fool the whole world—a Jon Hendrik Schön here, a Woo-Suk Hwang there—but survey after survey reveals that your garden-variety fraud is more prevalent than anyone cares to admit. Whose responsibility is it to police misconduct in science? And what motivates it in the first place? In the following pages, we take a look at what prompts those ethical missteps and what governments, universities, journals—and you—can do about it.
