10. Criteria for Research Misconduct
▪ Represents a significant
departure from accepted
practices
▪ Has been committed
intentionally, or knowingly,
or recklessly; and
▪ Can be proven by a
preponderance of evidence
▪ What is NOT
MISCONDUCT: honest,
unintentional error
11. Top ten “POOR” behaviors
Falsifying or ‘cooking’ research data
Ignoring major aspects of human-subject requirements
Not properly disclosing involvement in firms whose products are
based on one‘s own research
Relationships with students, research subjects or clients that may be
interpreted as questionable
Using another’s ideas without obtaining permission or giving due
credit (plagiarism)
12. Top ten behaviors
(continued)
Overlooking others' use of flawed data or questionable interpretation of
data
Changing the design, methodology or results of a study in response to
pressure from a funding source (falsification)
Unauthorized use of confidential information in connection with one’s
own research
Failing to present data that contradict one’s own previous research ????
Circumventing certain minor aspects of human-subject requirements
13. Other behaviors
Publishing the same data or results in two or more publications
Inappropriately assigning authorship credit
Withholding details of methodology or results in papers or proposals
Using inadequate or inappropriate research designs
Dropping observations or data points from analyses based on a gut feeling
that they were inaccurate
Inadequate record keeping related to research projects
14.
15.
16. How is misconduct identified
►Suspected and reported by a colleague
►Failure to confirm research results by own
lab or others
► Peer Rivalry or Jealousy
17. Case 1
• On 17 August 1992, a student complained to the Director IIM "While doing my summer
project, I had to do some modelling and data analysis. I had carried my copies
of Levin (Statistics for Management), and Baumol (Economic Theory and Operations Analysis) along.
From the organisation I was in, I borrowed copies of Wagner (Principles of Operations Research)
and Quantitative Techniques for Managerial Decisions by U. K. Srivastava (a CMA Prof. at IIMA),
G. V. Shenoy, and S. C. Sharma. As I was browsing through the books, I came across a
most interesting thing. At several places, the Srivastava, Shenoy, Sharma book had simply
lifted stuff from the other three books (Baumol, Levin, and Wagner) and no references
anywhere in the book". Upon enquiry a Committee, based on a report by a student, found
that the book Quantitative Techniques for Managerial Decisions by U. K. Srivastava, G. V. Shenoy,
and S. C. Sharma had copied without acknowledgment of the source at least at 10 different
places including 5 foreign books and some other Indian books, such as Baumol, Levin and
Wagner (all books were published prior to the publication of the book).
18. Case 2
• On 3 March 2012, the director of IIM Indore, N. Ravichandran, has been asked by
the Centre to respond to an accusation of plagiarism against him and another senior
faculty member of the institute, Omkar D. Palsule-Desai. They had submitted a
paper—The management case on "Euthanasia: Should it be Lawful or Otherwise?".
Ahmedabad-based researcher K.R. Narendrababu has complained that the paper
was sourced heavily from a Supreme Court judgment without adequate attribution.
One month later, on 12 April, veteran industrialist Mr LN Jhunjhunwala, who is
also the chairman of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Indore's board of
governors resigned citing major differences with Dr N Ravichandran. Another
board member and Bhopal-based retired IAS officer Dr MN Buch also resigned.
19. Case 3
• Prof. B.S. Rajput was the vice-chancellor of Kumaon University, India in 2002 when various
physicists in India started a website alleging that some of his papers claimed authorship
of work, reported earlier by other researchers. The principal allegation was that a paper
published by S.C. Joshi and B.S. Rajput entitled "Axion-dilaton black holes with SL(2,Z)
symmetry through APT-FGP model" in Europhysics Letters, Vol. 57, No. 5, was entirely
copied from a six-year-old paper by Renata Kallosh of Stanford in Physical Review D, Vol
54, No. 8.[10] However, the campaign very soon included three other papers by Prof. Rajput
and colleagues as plagiarised papers. One of these papers "BPS Spectra of Dyons in Four-
Dimensional N = 2 Supersymmetric Theories" was later recalled by the journal Progress of
Theoretical Physics
20. Case 3 Continued
• On publication of the site, Prof. Rajput threatened to take legal action against the website, maintaining that the paper was
written by Mr. Joshi, one of his students, without prior approval from him. However, the site was endorsed by over 40
Indian physicists. In addition, seven physicists including Nobel Laureate, S. Chu, R. Laughlin and D. Osheroff wrote to the
president of India, APJ Abdul Kalam requesting an investigation in this matter.The situation became murkier when Prof
Kavita Pandey, head of the Physics department at Kumaon University claimed that she was suspended by the
university as she brought this issue to the public.
• In midst of all this blame game, the president of India asked the Governor of Uttaranchal who was also the chancellor of
the Kumaon University to institute an enquiry to investigate the case. The committee led by a retired judge of Allahabad
high court Justice S.R. Singh consisted of Prof K.B. Powar, former chief of the Association of Indian Universities, New
Delhi, Prof Indira Nath, former secretary of the Society of Scientific Values and AIIMS faculty member and physicist Prof
R. Rajaraman of JNU. The committee presented its report in February 2003 upholding the plagiarism charges. Prof.
Rajput maintained that he has personally done no harm and it was his student's fault. However, he resigned
from Vice-chancellorship immediately after the report.
21. Case 4
• A controversy erupted in National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS), Pune in 2006 when an
anonymous mail alleged that the authors (H. Rangaswami and Colleagues from the group of Dr.
Gopal Kundu) may have misrepresented data (especially through Western blots) in a paper
published in Journal of Biological Chemistry. The allegation was that they had rehashed the same
set of data which they had published earlier. An internal committee of the NCCS advised the
authors to take back their paper, however an independent committee led by G. Padmanabhan, a
former director of Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, concluded that there was no
manipulation in the data. This led to some heated debate between Indian Scientists with several
viewpoints being presented. On 23 February 2007, the Journal of Biological Chemistry withdrew the
paper amid allegations of data manipulation. The authors still maintain that the two papers used
different set of data though similar experiments. In November 2010, after an internal
investigation by its ethics committee, the Indian Academy of Sciences banned Gopal Kundu
from participating in their activities for three years.
22. Case 5
• In yet another high-profile case involving a Director of an Indian technical institute, a web campaign, similar
to the campaign started by physicists in India, reported plagiarism in papers published by Prof. Kalyan
Kumar and colleagues at North Eastern Regional Institute of Science and Technology, NERIST, India.
Three papers have been reported to have similarity to works reported earlier. Two of these, "Improved PID
controller using fuzzy precompensated algorithm for PMBLDC motor drive" (AMSE Advances in Modelling
and Analysis C, Volume 61, number 1-2, January 2006, Page (s) 1–15) and "Optimum PI controller for
Permanent Magnet Brushless DC Motor" (Electrical Review, Volume 12, No 6, June 2005, Pages 16 –23) have
been shown to be very similar to earlier papers by Bhim Singh, AHN Reddy and SS Murthy of Indian
Institute of Technology, Delhi. The papers of Singh, Reddy and Murthy, viz "Hybrid fuzzy logic
proportional plus conventional integral-derivative controller for permanent magnet brushless DC motor"
(IEEE International Conference on Industrial Technology 2000, Volume 2, 19–22 January 2000, pp. 185–191) and
"Gain Scheduling Control of Permanent Magnet Brushless dc Motor" (Journal of Institution of Engineers : India
EL, Vol 84, September 2003 ) predate the papers of Kumar and Singh by five years.
23. Case 6
• Another controversy occurred in 2007, this time surrounding authors from Anna
University and Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR) publishing an article in
the Journal of Materials Science.[The article written by K. Muthukumar, T. Mathews, S.
Selladurai and R. Bokalawela was reported to be a reproduction of an article published
earlier in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by David Andersson and others
at the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. In a correction published online, the journal
reported that the article 'does not just plagiarise the results presented in the PNAS paper but
actually copies most of it word for word'. The journal had started an investigation and is also
working with officials at the two institutions. The three authors other than the first author
have distanced themselves from the paper and the first author has accepted his mistake.
24. Case 7
• IIT Kharagpur physics professor R.N.P. Choudhary has lost his position as head of
department after a junior faculty member Dr. A.K. Thakur accused him of not
sharing research credit with him.IIT Delhi was also in news for retraction notice by
the Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section B: Beam
Interactions with Materials and Atoms in its January 2010 issue, blaming Dr. Anup
K Ghosh – a faculty of IIT Delhi, along with others, for being allegedly involved in
plagiarism. Nearly a year later, this time Prof. Ashok Kumar of Bioscience and
Bioengineering school of IIT Kanpur has been accused with plagiarism charges by
the journal Biotechnology Advances and subsequently retracted two of his articles.
25. Case 8
• Dr. S.K. Sahoo is a scientist in the field of nanotechnology (cancer drug
delivery) at the Institute of Life Sciences (an autonomous institute of the
Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India) located in Bhubaneswar,
India. There have been serious concerns related to the accuracy of the data
presented in many articles published by him. According to a notice published
in the June 2013 issue of the journal Acta Biomaterialia, five research articles
published by Dr. S.K. Sahoo have been retracted following highly unethical
practices such as serial self plagiarism, data manipulation and falsification of
results.
