Research Misconduct and Crime Lessons from Criminal Science on Preventing Misconduct and Promoting Integrity

Abstract

Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable.

Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays

For 200 years, criminologists theorized that delinquent and criminal acts arise from deviant psychological states (such as irrationality or immorality) and/or social conditions that produce these psychological states. This theoretical perspective, which is being duplicated in most efforts to understand and control research misconduct, has not been productive. More recently, criminological perspectives have emerged, emphasizing situational factors that enhance or restrict the opportunity for illegal or imprudent behavior. These so-called “opportunity” theories have been shown to have practical value in reducing crime rates. We explore the promise of these newer theories for the responsible conduct of research (RCR).

Notes

As an anonymous reviewer (whom we thank) pointed out, a significant exception to this trend can be found in the efforts of editors and publishers of scientific research to improve the integrity and reliability of the research literature. The ongoing International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication, for which the fifth call for papers has recently been published (Rennie et al., 2003), is an example of how extensive this effort has been. Many of the practices that attempt to ensure the integrity of the research record that have been discussed and adopted can be called situational in our terms, including, for example, increasingly specific instructions for authors, the use of structured abstracts, sign-off sheets for authorship and conflicts of interest, and the like.