How Is the “Integrity of Research” Regulated

This chapter examines what constitutes scientific misconduct and the process that is supposed to be used to separate the guilty from the innocent. The process is examined from four perspectives: those of the person bringing the allegation, the person against whom the allegation is brought, the university officials who received the complaint and invoke the university's process for dealing with allegations of misconduct, and the faculty committee that is appointed to take evidence and resolve the allegations. The chapter is organized as follows. The first section recounts the history of the regulation of research misconduct. The second discusses the federal definition of misconduct, and differentiates between conduct that is misconduct and conduct that may be antisocial but is not misconduct. The third section discusses the actual procedures at the university level for resolving allegations of misconduct from the four perspectives noted above: complainant, target, institution, and faculty committee. The fourth section spells out the procedures at the federal level and discusses the hearing process. Case studies are included at the end of the chapter.