WIKIMEDIA, JON SULLIVANIt’s presumed that research misconduct wastes resources, many of them given to scientists through federal dollars. Ferric Fang of the University of Washington and his colleagues quantified just how much fraud costs the government in a new report published yesterday (August 14) in eLife.
It turns out that every paper retracted because of research misconduct costs about $400,000 in funds from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH)—totaling $58 million for papers retracted between 1992 and 2012. The authors pointed out that this total represents a fraction of a percent of the NIH budget for these years.
And scientific fraud incurs additional costs. “The damage to researchers’ careers (who in some cases have done nothing wrong themselves), the institutional costs of investigating suspected fraud, the misdirection of public policy, and the misleading of other scientists who pursue false leads are other important costs,” Fang told Retraction Watch.
Still, compared to other government agencies, research misconduct is comparatively small, and less than what Fang had expected. “When one compares the ...
