Ethical controversy and reports of scientific misconduct have received substantial attention recently. Are researchers behaving unethically more than they used to? Are technologies both enabling such misconduct and making it easier to catch? Are there truly more such misconduct and breaches of ethics relative to the amount of research performed and reported?
Answering these questions would require duplicating all past research and subjecting it to today's more-intense examination, a clearly impossible task. What we can say definitively is that research is disseminated more widely and rapidly than in the past, and thus any problems, especially with important discoveries that can greatly impact society, receive much more scrutiny. The stakes seem higher than ever before, both for the career advancement, prestige, and financial support of researchers reporting the discoveries, and for science itself, because unfavorable attention can erode public trust, ultimately decrease funding, and slow research progress.
No common standards of ...
