Physicist Jan-Hendrik Schön, employed by the American Bell Labs, committed scientific fraud for years. Until he used the same diagram for two different studies and was fired forthwith. UT-professor and physicist Ad Lagendijk is indignant about the affair.
'You have to be sick to do something like that for such a long time. The only reason I can think of is that the pressure on scientists is increasing these last few years. One list after another with most-cited scientists is presented. This individual has apparently taken this to the extreme. Not that that justifies it, absolutely not.
'There are no protocols at universities to prevent this sort of thing happening, not as far as I know. But the subject is being discussed more and more the last few years. Societies, the American Physical Society for examply, have ethical committees producing guidelines that say that fraud is not allowed. That helps somewhat of course, but not a lot.
'A situation occurring often is undeserved co-authorship. Someone did not do anything, but does want to put his name to an article to get as many publications as possible. Lately it is noticeable that young researchers do not accept that any more, they are a bit more individual. I do wonder what Schön's co-authors did. Not a lot probably.
'One option is to be more strict when archiving data, draft a format for that. At the moment this happens haphazardly and the turnover in groups is substantial. Researchers come and go. But it takes enormous discipline to archive. We do have lab books that people use to write down data, and stick in pictures. But this approach is not standardised.
'Someone in the group could try to deceive me, but that would be a full-time job. Within the group we discuss and examine all data. Raw data.
'Experiments are rarely repeated by someone in the group. It is considered redundant and would be a waste of time in 99.9% of the cases. But a researcher does his own experiments several times and discusses the results with the senior-members, sometimes daily. And when presenting research that has taken years, you will repeat it, measure again, you want it to be right. Especially when you realise that the results will get a lot of attention from your colleagues.
'More attention should be paid to presenting a margin of error onan experiment. At least that shows that the researcher has carried out a number of measurements.
'I personally have never experienced fraud on this scale. I have known other scientists to run off with your data to speed up their own research. Which is not as it should be either.'
