ALT In 2009 PLOS ONE published a round-up of 18 surveys of scientists, mostly in America, that had asked about fraud. Though only 2% of respondents admitted falsifying data themselves, 14% said they knew someone who had. Similarly, a third of those asked confessed to other questionable research practices, such as dropping inconvenient data points based on “gut feeling”, or making important changes to a study’s protocol while it was in progress. But they pointed the finger at 72% of their colleagues. America is not exceptional in this. In a survey of academics in Britain, published in 2016, nearly one in five reported having fabricated data. And in a recent survey of researchers in the Netherlands, 10% of those in the life and medical sciences admitted they had falsified or fabricated data.

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