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International - Misconduct Cases
Nordic Countries Report on Misconduct Activity in the 90's
Volume 7, No. 4, September 1999
The Nordic countries that have established such committees are
Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Iceland, the fifth Nordic
country, does not have a committee. The Danish Committee on Scientific
Dishonesty has carried the largest caseload.
Table 1: Activity by national committees on scientific dishonesty
in four Nordic countries since establishment.
| Misconduct Activity |
Denmark 1992 |
Finland 1994 |
Norway 1994 |
Sweden 1997 |
Total |
| Cases received |
45 |
7 |
9 |
7 |
68 |
| Cases investigated |
25 |
7 |
8 |
7 |
47 |
| Investigations completed |
24 |
5 |
4 |
4 |
37 |
| Dishonesty finding |
4 |
2 |
0 |
3 |
9 |
The most frequent allegation that led to an investigation was disputed
authorship. The range of allegations are in Table 2. The dishonesty
findings were based on plagiarism, attributing authorship without
permission, soliciting ghost authorship by a company, distorting
research results by falsely reporting methodology or sample size
or selectively excluding subjects, breaching an agreement on the
use of material furnished by another laboratory, and publishing
collaborative work as a single author.
Table 2: Number of investigated cases by type of alleged misconduct.
| Misconduct |
Cases |
| Disputed authorship |
16 |
| Manipulation of data |
8 |
| Wrongful use of data |
8 |
| Theft of data |
6 |
| Fabrication of data |
5 |
| Plagiarism |
5 |
| Twisted statistics |
4 |
| False description of methods |
3 |
| Other |
8 |
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Assurance
