BIOET 533
Ethical Dimensions of Renewable Energy and Sustainability Systems

1.2 Fabrication

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1.2 Fabrication

Image of a wolf running with a sheep in its mouth while a boy tries to catch it
Figure 2.3: Illustration of The Boy who Cried Wolf from Aesop's Fables
Credit: Francis Barlow from Wikimedia (Public Domain)

There is an Aesop's Fable you may be familiar with, titled The Boy Who Cried Wolf, about a shepherd boy who shouts out to the local villagers that a wolf was attacking his flock, but when the villagers rushed to the scene, there was no wolf to be found. The boy did this multiple times, and each time, there was no wolf to be found. When a wolf actually did come to attack the boy's flock, the villagers had ignored the cries, thinking that it was a false alarm, and the boy's flock was destroyed by the wolf. The moral of this story is, at its root, about how being caught fabricating observations, in this case about a wolf, will inevitably lead to an erosion of trust in other claims.

Fabrication is making up data or results and recording them in the research record. Fabrication in research typically concerns the construction of data to fit or conform to a given test or confirm a particular hypothesis. Fabrication is no small issue in the sciences, and publishing work or releasing medicines based on fabricated results can bring big rewards. There exist numerous examples of fabrication in science, medicine, and engineering, many of which likely go undetected.

"Biomedical research has become a winner-take-all game — one with perverse incentives that entice scientists to cut corners and, in some instances, falsify data or commit other acts of misconduct," says senior author Arturo Casadevall of Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

The study reviewed 2,047 papers retracted from the biomedical literature through May 2012 and consulted the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Research Integrity and Retractionwatch.com to establish the cause.

And the team found that about 21 percent of the retractions were attributable to error, while 67 percent were due to misconduct, including fraud or suspected fraud (43 percent), duplicate publication (14 percent), and plagiarism (10 percent). Miscellaneous or unknown reasons accounted for the remaining 12 percent.

"What's troubling is that the more skillful the fraud, the less likely that it will be discovered, so there likely are more fraudulent papers out there that haven't yet been detected and retracted," says Casadevall.

The problems with the fabrication of data and results are multiple

  • First, fabrication creates an unreliable research record which, if published, can at best be misleading to anyone reading and using the paper and at worse, life-threatening, if findings are applied.
  • Second, fabricated results essentially make an entire research project junk, particularly if the data is actually used to support an analysis and hypothesis.
  • Third, making up results in government-funded research takes resources directly away from other research that was not funded but would have not been fabricated, i.e., real research results.
  • Fourth, publishing fabricated research results also drives up competition (in publications and grants) and expectations from unfabricated results, which may present a more complex picture.

Discussion Questions

  1. Would you want to take a medicine that was suspected to be based on fabricated test results?
  2. What would be the problem with "filling in the blanks" of experimental runs 21 through 40, if results from experimental runs 1-20 were all in the same range?
  3. We often will use interpolation to fill in data where data cannot be collected, such as in environmental or geographic analyses. Why is this an acceptable practice and not considered fabrication?