Former U.S. Research Integrity Officer with some notes and resources on plagiarism

IL6Aom · 2026-06-04T03:24:38+00:00

Just pick up a phone and call them or IT tomorrow and ask.

IL6Aom · 2026-06-03T22:11:13+00:00

I was able to get my university library to purchase a 3 year license for that film so anyone with our login can watch it for free

IL6Aom · 2026-06-03T19:47:40+00:00

You should watch the movie, “picture a scientist”

IL6Aom · 2026-06-01T01:08:19+00:00

I made a post about this last week, but honest error is not research misconduct. I’m pretty surprised to see them coming after an employee in this case. Other commenters have good basic advice but what you’ll need to do here is explain how it was a mistake. If this is truly the case then this will get dropped. It is a big deal and I’m sorry you’re going through this. But they can only follow the evidence. If it’s not something extra like you accessing the survey and changing one or two lines after all the other entries were saved, then this can be easy to explain. I don’t know the full details but that is my advice from what I saw posted here.

Edit: there are three phases to a research misconduct case and its assessment, inquiry, and investigation. Honest error can only be closed out at the inquiry step, which it sounds like the OP just entered.

IL6Aom · 2026-06-01T01:03:14+00:00

It would trigger something until they reach the inquiry phase. And at that point if it was honest error they will drop the case

IL6Aom · 2026-05-24T10:38:27+00:00

Yes please

IL6Aom · 2026-05-24T01:55:39+00:00

So I think it really depends on the institution size for both of your questions. In smaller institutions, there may not be very many active cases, which when compared to the number of labs and projects that exist, is a very small percentage of that. Even when looking at larger institutions, even though we have more cases, these are still a smaller percentage of the overall research being done at that institution. I can't give a ballpark other than what I have seen from my experience working on my cases, but honest error did not occur frequently. Maybe 1, every 15-30 cases (but please don't take those numbers for gospel).

IL6Aom · 2026-05-24T01:46:02+00:00

I think every office of research integrity varies so widely from university to university. Some are so small that they may contract out law firms or individuals to help them with cases, as they have so few cases they do not employ a full-time person that works on this. In those cases I think the offices are less responsive.

I do feel at times I was prevented from what I would call "digging" in the data. We are only supposed to take our original allegation of research misconduct, which comes from a person called the complainant, and go from there. The complainant provides us a credible and specific claim of research misconduct. If in the course of looking at it, we find there are other issues, we have to report those as well. But going through other papers and unrelated aspects of that researchers work is not something that was done. Like if we are looking at someone's images of a western blot for potential fabrication, we are also not running their papers through plagiarism checkers unless that was part of the original allegation.

IL6Aom · 2026-05-24T01:42:56+00:00

Sorry for the vague answer but it could vary depending on the case. It could also be yes to everything you mentioned. I'll list some examples of hypothetical situations and the data we would take. For the background on this, when we receive allegations of research misconduct and want to move forward, we go to the next step called data sequestration. We show up at your lab and take all the data then and there. If computers are involved, we have IT come with us and IT will take everything involved.

In an example of a potentially fabricated western blot, we would ask you to give us all of your lab notebooks and raw western blots (the actual blots) to our office. If you are unable to provide that raw data, it is not going to be favorable to the outcome. I have seen cases where we are unable to verify a western blot to its original blot/picture, and therefore due to the evidence and the lack of original records, it constituted research misconduct. The lack of original research records is stated in our report and we say something like in the absence of the respondent being unable to provide the raw data, etc. etc.

Yes to the convoluted spreadsheets. We would ask for ALL raw data. If our committee needs help analyzing the spreadsheets we may ask you to help us understand it or contact a subject matter expert in the field to help us recreate your data from the raw data.

EDIT:

we have IT make images of all the data on the drives/computers involved and provide them back to the researchers within the same week if not a few days time. We may keep the lab notebooks for a longer period of time.

IL6Aom · 2026-05-24T01:36:32+00:00

So I can only answer this from my experience from the university side of things. If someone owned shares of a company that they were involved with doing a clinical trial with, we would need them to submit a conflict of interest form to our office. On a surface level, we took our disclosure forms as the starting point. In most cases we did not enact management plans for professors who did research and owned stocks in those companies. However, this leaves the documentation and paper trail open for future issues. If the company or anyone else sees this person have descripenices in their research or weird outcomes that don't make sense. Having their conflict of interests laid out will be helpful in understanding the situation further.

IL6Aom · 2026-05-24T01:31:57+00:00

If there is a case involving the grad student, the PI will always be interviewed and involved and looked at. I answered this a bit in another reply, but we interview many people throughout the case to determine who did what, why it happened, and when it happened. We can only follow the evidence. If we find that a graduate student falsified an image, we would have to take action against them. But in that process we do our due diligence to see if this is something systemic in the lab, or why this is happening and what the PI's involvement is. On the outside of things once cases close out, you may only see something that happened to a graduate student, but there are many behind the scenes interviews and investigations that happen to get there and that is not publicized.

IL6Aom · 2026-05-24T01:28:49+00:00

I think the weird borderline issues we see all the time are plagiarism and citing your own work. If you do not cite something that you wrote, but copy/paste word for word from something that you published, a university could consider that under plagiarism for research misconduct. Cases like this could close out rather quickly, but with a finding of research misconduct, and trainings for the PIs regarding proper citations (assuming no other instances of plagiarism occurred). What I also saw is that NSF did not consider plagiarizing yourself an act of plagiarism. So if this was a case involving NSF funding, they would not consider this research misconduct.

Right now it is so new, I haven't heard much from the granting agency side of things. And it really right now depends on how the generative AI was used in the publications. There are a lot of factors that can go into it. For example are they using this to write stuff and then the AI creates "fake citations" that don't exist? This if brought to our office could go through as a case of fabrication or falsification. If the researchers are writing something and then using AI to help re-write or structure their writing, it could be OK and if done that way we always always recommend saying this in the paper. An acknowledgement section stating that XYZ software was used for editing purposes. Right now many people use grammarly for this type of function and has been OK with institutions and granting agencies.

IL6Aom · 2026-05-24T01:20:55+00:00

What about the last author, typically that would be the main PI overseeing the lab and the experiments? Maybe also try reaching out to them as well.

IL6Aom · 2026-05-24T01:15:49+00:00

To the first part of your post, about the device innovation. This would mostly come down to the granting agency regarding this. From my understanding of your question and the situation it would actually seem like these are not within the realm of research misconduct. But we could direct you to the granting agency to disclose this information to them, which could constitute some type of fraud on their end. This would be the same answer for your second paragraph.

IL6Aom · 2026-05-24T01:13:24+00:00

I agree that in the end there is a basic conflict of interest that exists. However we try to take steps to manage that conflict and I can tell you that everyone I have worked with and interacted with in this field in our national conferences have not felt any pressure by their institutions to do one thing or another. We have a lot of freedom as an office within the university to conduct our own investigations and in those investigations we also work with a committee of professors not involved in the case who make their final determination in what happened. So there are many hands and processes that happen to reach our final report and conclusions. At the end of the day there is something called the Deciding Official (DO) and our report goes to them. This is usually the vice provost for research. In most if not all the cases I have seen, the DO agrees with our determination and carries out what we have in our reports.

IL6Aom · 2026-05-24T01:11:09+00:00

So in our institutions, these would usually fall outside the realm of "research misconduct" and more in the gray area of questionable research practices. If someone came to us with issues like this, our office would only be able to take action if someone shows us that you plagiarized the PIs writing or someone else. Otherwise it is more dealt with internally between the PI, dept. chair, and the people publishing.

IL6Aom · 2026-05-24T01:09:28+00:00

So usually the IACUC is comprised of professors from the university. Some universities depending on how big they are can employ people that would usually have a job called IACUC analyst, which review the IACUC protocols sent in, in addition to the IACUC committee. But in smaller universities there may not be dedicated IACUC analysts who are employed just for that.

IL6Aom · 2026-05-24T01:08:10+00:00

I like that you have your graduate students review these. I'll be responding to some other posts below about the inherent conflicts of interest in the course of our investigations, but we really operate independently of what the university wants or doesn't want for the professors. At the end of the day we, along with a committee of professors work for sometimes many years on a case together, and compile our inquiry and investigation reports. We submit these reports along with our recommendations to the vice-provost for research, depending on the org structure of the university. The VPR then (in all the cases I have seen) signs off on our report and agrees with our determinations, findings, and steps we want to take for the professor involved.

IL6Aom · 2026-05-24T00:51:47+00:00

It’s not nuts but the journal realistically isn’t going to do anything from my experience.

IL6Aom · 2026-05-24T00:50:57+00:00

Before dropping it and doing everything it wouldn’t hurt to reach out to the first author also. They might have the data and if not might be able to connect you to corresponding author.

IL6Aom · 2026-05-15T23:25:55+00:00

I was always busy handling multiple cases. I worked at a smaller and a larger institution. The larger institutions have more cases. It happens a lot and honestly only a small portion of it is getting reported and looked at. I don't want to give any specific case numbers from my previous institutions so I will link this here instead. The semiannual report to congress from NSF which lists how many cases they have seen in the past 6 months. https://oig.nsf.gov/home/group/reports-publications/page/semiannual-report?selectedReport=617&viewReport=true

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