CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: causes of research misconduct

  • Research Misconduct Investigations: How ORI and UKRIO Procedures Compare

    Grant administrators rarely encounter research misconduct allegations often — but when one arrives, the clock starts immediately, and the procedural path depends entirely on which side of the Atlantic the funding sits. A US Public Health Service (PHS) grant triggers a federally regulated process overseen by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI); a UK Research England or UKRI grant triggers an institution-led process shaped, but not enforced, by the UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO). Confusing the two — assuming ORI’s binding timelines apply to a UK case, or that UKRIO can compel an outcome the way ORI can — is a common and costly error for administrators managing cross-border collaborations.

    This guide sets out, side by side, what each body actually is, how each defines misconduct, and how the investigation stages differ — so administrators handling an allegation tied to a grant know which rulebook applies.

    How ORI and UKRIO define research misconduct

    Both frameworks agree on a common core — fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism (FFP) — but they diverge sharply in scope.

    ORI operates under 42 CFR Part 93, the PHS Policies on Research Misconduct. Its definition is deliberately narrow: research misconduct means fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results. A finding requires three elements to be met: a significant departure from accepted practices in the relevant research community; committed intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly; and proven by a preponderance of the evidence. Honest error and legitimate differences of scientific opinion are explicitly excluded.

    UKRIO, by contrast, works from a broader, non-statutory definition: “behaviours that deliberately or recklessly fall short of the standards expected in the conduct of research.” Its guidance, aligned with the UK Concordat to Support Research Integrity (Universities UK, 2019), extends beyond FFP to cover breaches of ethical approval, undeclared conflicts of interest, and mismanagement of research data — while also naming a distinct, lower-severity category, “questionable research practices” (QRPs), for avoidable errors that fall short of intentional misconduct.

    Regulator versus adviser: two different roles

    The most consequential difference is not definitional but structural: ORI is a federal oversight body; UKRIO is an independent charity with no regulatory power.

    • ORI sits within the US Department of Health and Human Services and directly oversees how institutions handle misconduct allegations tied to PHS-funded research (including NIH grants). It can conduct its own oversight review of an institution’s findings, recommend administrative actions, and refer findings to the HHS Departmental Appeals Board.
    • UKRIO was established as an independent advisory charity in 2006. It publishes a model investigation procedure that UK research organisations may adopt or adapt, offers case-by-case advice, and promotes good practice — but it does not investigate cases itself, does not mandate a single national procedure, and has no statutory sanctioning power.

    UK funders address this gap contractually rather than through a regulator. UKRI’s Guidance for Research Organisations on the Investigation of Research Misconduct (April 2025) requires any organisation receiving UKRI funding to investigate allegations against staff or students under its own Grant Terms and Conditions, with UKRI able to take funding action if an organisation fails to do so.

    How an investigation actually runs, stage by stage

    Both systems separate a preliminary triage stage from a full inquiry, but they name and time these stages differently.

    Stage ORI (US, PHS-funded research) UKRIO model (UK institutions)
    Trigger Allegation received by institution’s Research Integrity Officer Concern raised with a “Named Person” or responsible officer
    Triage Assessment: does the allegation meet the FFP definition and involve PHS funding? Initial assessment: does it fall within the misconduct procedure’s scope?
    Formal fact-finding Inquiry (institution-level, time-limited) Initial investigation to establish if there is a case to answer
    Full review Investigation, following a sufficient inquiry finding Full investigation by an academic panel, including external members
    Standard of proof Preponderance of the evidence Not codified nationally; set by each institution’s procedure
    External oversight ORI oversight review of institutional findings; report to PHS agency None mandatory; UKRIO offers advice only
    Appeal route HHS Departmental Appeals Board Institutional appeal, managed by someone other than the original Named Person

    Under the UKRIO model, once a panel reports its findings, the Named Person decides on next steps: referral to institutional disciplinary proceedings, correction of the published record, and notifying relevant funders. Where allegations are not upheld, the same procedure is meant to protect the reputation of the person accused — a feature both systems share in principle, though neither publishes comparable statistics on false-allegation rates.

    Answer-first: common questions on research misconduct

    What are the three types of research misconduct?

    Both ORI and most UK institutional policies converge on the same core triad: fabrication (inventing data or results), falsification (manipulating research materials, equipment, or data to misrepresent results), and plagiarism (using another person’s ideas, processes, or words without credit). This is often abbreviated FFP.

    What are some examples of research misconduct?

    Common examples include inventing patient consent records, selectively deleting inconvenient data points, copying text or images from another paper without attribution, and misrepresenting the outcome of a statistical test. UKRIO guidance also treats proceeding without required ethical approval as a form of misconduct, even without FFP intent.

    What counts as research misconduct?

    Conduct counts as misconduct when it represents a significant, intentional or reckless departure from accepted research standards — not an honest mistake or a genuine scientific disagreement. ORI requires proof by a preponderance of the evidence; UKRIO-aligned institutions apply a similar intent-based threshold under their own procedures.

    What this means for research administrators

    For administrators managing grants that cross jurisdictions — a common scenario in NIH-funded international collaborations or Horizon Europe partnerships involving UK institutions — three practical points follow from the comparison above:

    • Know which body has enforcement power. Only ORI can conduct oversight review and refer a case to a federal appeals process; UKRIO cannot compel an institutional outcome.
    • Check the funder’s own reporting clause. UKRI’s April 2025 guidance obliges the receiving institution — not UKRIO — to investigate and report; PHS grant terms impose parallel obligations that run through ORI.
    • Do not assume a single global timeline. ORI-regulated inquiries and investigations run to defined federal timeframes; UKRIO-aligned UK procedures are set institution by institution, so the applicable deadline sits in the local Code of Practice for Research, not in UKRIO’s own documents.

    Administrators supporting research administration functions across both systems should hold copies of both the relevant institutional misconduct procedure and the specific grant terms — the procedural detail, not the high-level definition, is where jurisdictional mismatches cause delay.

    Where the two systems are heading

    Both frameworks are converging on the same underlying principle even as their governance models remain distinct: misconduct findings should correct the scholarly record, not just discipline an individual. UKRI’s 2025 guidance tightened institutional reporting obligations, and ORI continues to publish case summaries and administrative actions as a transparency mechanism. Neither change closes the structural gap — one system regulates, the other advises — so for the foreseeable future, administrators handling cross-border allegations will need to work both playbooks rather than assume one substitutes for the other.

    As with contributor-role standards, where CASRAI originated the CRediT taxonomy in 2014 and the standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, research integrity governance illustrates a broader pattern in research administration: originating bodies and enforcement bodies are frequently separate, and knowing which is which is a prerequisite for compliant practice.

  • UK Research Integrity Office vs US ORI: Comparing Oversight Models

    For institutions with staff, students, or funding on both sides of the Atlantic, understanding how research misconduct is handled is not an academic curiosity — it shapes compliance obligations, reporting duties, and reputational risk. The UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO) and the US Office of Research Integrity (ORI) are the two most frequently cited reference points for research integrity oversight in the English-speaking research world, yet they sit at opposite ends of the regulatory spectrum: one advisory, one statutory. This analysis sets out what separates the UK’s Concordat-based, self-governing model from the US’s federally regulated assurance regime, and what that gap means in practice for institutions and publishers operating across both jurisdictions.

    Overview: two philosophies of oversight

    The UK has no statutory research-integrity regulator. Instead, oversight is distributed across independent charities, a voluntary sector-wide concordat, and each institution’s own governance. The US, by contrast, ties oversight of biomedical and behavioural research directly to federal funding: any institution receiving Public Health Service (PHS) money — chiefly through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — must operate under enforceable federal regulation.

    This is the single most important distinction for anyone comparing the two systems: the UK model relies on reputational and contractual incentives to drive good practice, while the US model relies on funding-conditional legal compliance.

    The UK model: UKRIO, the Concordat, and self-governance

    UKRIO was established in 2006 as an independent charity. It offers confidential, impartial advice to researchers, institutions, and members of the public on good research conduct and on handling allegations of misconduct — but it does not investigate cases itself. That responsibility sits with the research organisation where the alleged conduct occurred, guided by UKRIO’s Code of Practice for Research.

    Sitting alongside UKRIO is the Concordat to Support Research Integrity, first published by Universities UK in 2012 and substantially revised in 2019. The Concordat is a voluntary framework, not legislation, built around five commitments:

    • Maintaining the highest standards of rigour and integrity in research
    • Conducting research in an appropriate, ethically sound, and legally compliant way
    • Supporting a research environment that is underpinned by a culture of integrity
    • Using robust and fair processes to investigate allegations of misconduct
    • Working openly and transparently, including public reporting on research integrity

    UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and Research England are among the Concordat’s signatories, alongside the UK’s major research funders and universities. More recently, UKRI has moved to strengthen system-level coordination through a Committee on Research Integrity, intended to work alongside UKRIO on cross-sector oversight rather than to replace institutional responsibility — a signal that the advisory model is being reinforced rather than converted into a regulator.

    One point that is often glossed over: UKRIO’s Code of Practice defines misconduct more broadly than the classic fabrication-falsification-plagiarism (FFP) triad. It also covers matters such as proceeding without necessary ethical approval, misrepresenting data or authorship, and breaching a researcher’s duty of care — a wider net than the narrower legal definition used in the US.

    The US model: ORI and federal regulatory assurance

    The Office of Research Integrity sits within the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), under the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health. Its jurisdiction is defined by federal regulation — 42 CFR Part 93 — and applies to institutions receiving PHS funding, which includes the large majority of federally funded biomedical and behavioural research in the United States.

    Unlike UKRIO, ORI operates within an assurance framework: institutions receiving PHS funds must file an institutional assurance confirming they have policies and procedures for handling misconduct allegations that meet federal standards. Institutions still conduct the initial investigation, but ORI reviews and can reopen or challenge that process. Where misconduct is confirmed, ORI can recommend administrative actions to HHS, ranging from supervision and certification requirements to debarment from federal funding — a consequence with no direct UK equivalent, since UKRIO has no power to withhold funding from anyone.

    Critically, the federal definition of research misconduct that ORI enforces is narrower than UKRIO’s: fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism (FFP) only, as set out in 42 CFR §93.103. Authorship disputes, data-management failures, or ethics-approval breaches that UKRIO would treat as misconduct concerns typically fall outside ORI’s formal jurisdiction, though they may still be handled under an institution’s own policies.

    Comparing the two models side by side

    Feature UK: UKRIO / Concordat US: Office of Research Integrity
    Legal status Independent charity; voluntary sector concordat Federal agency within HHS
    Established 2006 (UKRIO); 2012, revised 2019 (Concordat) 1992
    Governing basis No statute; reputational/contractual adoption Federal regulation, 42 CFR Part 93
    Investigatory role Advisory only; institutions investigate Reviews/oversees institutional investigations
    Misconduct definition Broader — includes ethics-approval and duty-of-care breaches Narrower — fabrication, falsification, plagiarism only
    Enforcement power None; promotes good practice via guidance Can recommend sanctions, including funding debarment
    Scope All disciplines, all UK research organisations PHS-funded biomedical/behavioural research
    Funding model Subscribing institutions pay for UKRIO’s services Federally funded as part of HHS budget

    Common questions on research integrity oversight

    What is the UK Research Integrity Office?

    The UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO) is an independent charity, established in 2006, that provides expert advice and guidance on good research practice and the handling of misconduct allegations. It has no statutory or investigatory powers — responsibility for investigating allegations remains with individual research institutions.

    What does the US Office of Research Integrity do?

    The Office of Research Integrity (ORI) is a federal agency within the US Department of Health and Human Services. It oversees research-misconduct policy for Public Health Service-funded research, reviews institutional investigations, and can recommend administrative sanctions, including funding debarment.

    What counts as research misconduct under UKRIO’s Code of Practice?

    UKRIO’s Code of Practice for Research defines misconduct more broadly than fabrication, falsification and plagiarism alone, also covering breaches such as proceeding without ethical approval, misrepresenting data, and failing in a researcher’s duty of care — a wider net than the US federal definition.

    What are the core commitments of the Concordat to Support Research Integrity?

    The Concordat to Support Research Integrity, revised in 2019, sets out five commitments covering rigour and transparency, appropriate governance, a supportive research environment, robust misconduct investigation, and transparent public reporting — voluntarily adopted by UK universities and funders including UKRI.

    Implications for multinational institutions and publishers

    For institutions operating research programmes, joint ventures, or staff exchanges across the UK and US, the practical consequence of these two models is a compliance asymmetry. A collaboration that falls short of UKRIO’s broader Code-of-Practice standard may still be technically compliant with ORI’s narrower FFP definition, and vice versa — an ethics-approval lapse that UKRIO would flag as a misconduct concern may sit outside ORI’s formal jurisdiction entirely.

    • Research administrators managing joint UK-US grants should map both frameworks into a single institutional misconduct policy rather than defaulting to whichever funder’s rules are stricter on paper.
    • Publishers and journal editors handling cross-border authorship disputes should recognise that a “no finding” outcome from a US institution under ORI’s FFP standard does not necessarily mean the same conduct would clear UKRIO’s Code of Practice, or vice versa.
    • Funders operating in both jurisdictions benefit from Concordat-style transparent reporting commitments even where they are not legally required, since it narrows the gap with ORI’s assurance-based accountability.

    Outlook: converging pressures, diverging structures

    Neither system shows signs of formally converging. The UK’s 2019 Concordat revision and UKRI’s growing coordination role reinforce, rather than replace, the advisory model; the US assurance regime remains anchored in federal regulation that would require congressional or HHS rule-making to change materially. What is converging is expectation: international publishers, funders such as Horizon Europe, and bodies like COPE and the Committee on Publication Ethics increasingly expect institutions to demonstrate research-integrity governance regardless of which national model applies. For multinational institutions, the practical answer is not to wait for the UK and US to align, but to build internal policy that satisfies the stricter of the two standards on every point where they diverge.

  • Causes of Research Misconduct: Pressures, Metrics and Prevention

    What counts as research misconduct?

    Rising retraction counts and a steady stream of high-profile data-integrity cases have kept research misconduct on the agenda for research offices, funders and publishers well into 2026. The causes of research misconduct are rarely a single bad actor acting alone; they are usually a combination of individual choices and the incentive structures institutions build around publication, funding and promotion.

    The internationally recognised core definition, set out by the US Office of Research Integrity (ORI), covers three deliberate acts: fabrication (inventing data), falsification (manipulating data, materials or processes to misrepresent results), and plagiarism (using others’ ideas, words or results without credit) – together known as FFP. The UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO) uses a broader definition that also captures breaches of ethical or legal obligations, such as unauthorised use of confidential data or failure to obtain proper approvals.

    FFP is distinct from questionable research practices (QRPs) – selective reporting, inappropriate authorship credit, or p-hacking – and from honest error. The distinction matters because prevention strategies differ: FFP requires deterrence and detection, while QRPs respond better to training, culture change and transparent reporting standards.

    The structural and incentive-driven causes of research misconduct

    A 2017 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report, Fostering Integrity in Research, grouped the drivers of misconduct into six overlapping categories: career and funding pressures, institutional failures of oversight, commercial conflicts of interest, inadequate training, erosion of mentoring standards, and misconduct as part of a wider pattern of deviant behaviour. Subsequent survey research has consistently pointed to the same structural pressures rather than isolated moral failure.

    Holtfreter et al. (2020), surveying academics on the perceived causes of misconduct, found that professional strains and stressors – particularly the pressure to secure competitive grant funding – were cited most often, ahead of individual psychological factors. This lines up with a widely cited earlier synthesis: Fanelli’s 2009 meta-analysis of survey data found that around 2% of scientists admitted to fabricating or falsifying data at least once, while up to a third admitted other questionable research practices – and both figures rose substantially when respondents were asked to estimate colleagues’ behaviour rather than report on their own.

    “Publish or perish” culture and metrics gaming sit at the centre of the structural explanation. When journal impact factor, h-index, publication counts and grant income are used as proxies for quality in hiring, tenure and national assessment exercises, researchers face direct incentives to inflate output rather than rigour. Davis (2003) categorised the underlying factors into three levels, which remains a useful frame for institutional leaders diagnosing where their own controls are weakest.

    Causal level Example factors Where responsibility sits
    Individual Career ambition, financial pressure, poor ethics training, psychological stress Researcher, supervisor
    Organisational Weak oversight, inadequate mentoring, metrics-driven promotion criteria, under-resourced integrity offices Institution, department
    Systemic Publish-or-perish funding models, journal impact-factor incentives, low probability of detection, weak sanctions Funders, publishers, national assessment bodies

    Two systemic factors deserve particular attention from research administrators: low detection probability and weak penalties. A web-search-grounded synthesis of current literature commissioned for this article converged on the same point – academics themselves believe that a low likelihood of investigation, combined with inconsistent sanctions once misconduct is confirmed, is a significant driver of continued misconduct. This is an institutional-design problem, not only an ethics-training problem.

    Quick answers: types, drivers and consequences

    What are the three main types of research misconduct?

    The three internationally recognised categories are fabrication (inventing data or results), falsification (manipulating data, materials or processes to misrepresent findings), and plagiarism (using others’ ideas or words without credit). Together these form the “FFP” definition used by ORI and most national integrity bodies.

    What are the reasons for unethical research?

    Reported reasons include career and funding pressures, institutional failures of oversight, commercial conflicts of interest, inadequate training in research ethics, erosion of mentoring standards, and – in a minority of cases – misconduct forming part of a broader pattern of deviant behaviour, per the National Academies’ 2017 analysis.

    What are the 5 unethical practices in conducting research?

    Commonly cited categories are falsification of data, failure to credit others, plagiarism, undisclosed conflicts of interest, and biased design or interpretation driven by outside influence. Authorship misconduct – including honorary and ghost authorship – is frequently added as a sixth practice in institutional policies.

    What are the 5 main ethical issues in research?

    Beyond FFP itself, institutions most often flag informed consent failures, conflicts of interest, data management and privacy breaches, authorship disputes, and inadequate oversight of research involving human or animal subjects as recurring ethical issues requiring governance attention.

    Evidence-based prevention strategies for institutional leaders

    Because the causes are structural as well as individual, effective prevention combines training with changes to incentive design. Institutional leaders following frameworks from COPE, UKRIO and the UK Concordat to Support Research Integrity typically prioritise the following:

    • Decouple assessment from raw output metrics. Reduce reliance on publication counts and journal impact factor in hiring, tenure and internal funding decisions, in line with responsible-metrics initiatives such as DORA.
    • Fund and empower a dedicated integrity office. A resourced office that can investigate allegations promptly – and is seen to do so – directly addresses the “low detection probability” driver identified in the literature.
    • Make authorship transparent and auditable. Structured, taxonomy-based contributor statements reduce opportunities for honorary and ghost authorship. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014; the standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022, and its adoption by journals makes individual contributions explicit rather than assumed.
    • Strengthen mentoring and mandatory ethics training for early-career researchers, who are disproportionately exposed to supervision gaps.
    • Protect whistleblowers with clear, enforced anti-retaliation policies – a precondition for any self-reporting culture to function.
    • Apply consistent, proportionate sanctions once misconduct is confirmed, closing the gap between policy and enforcement that researchers themselves identify as a weakness.

    Implications for institutions, funders and publishers

    The practical implication is that misconduct prevention cannot sit solely within research ethics training. In 2023, Crossref and Retraction Watch partnered to integrate more than 43,000 retraction records into open, machine-readable metadata – a structural fix that makes retraction status discoverable at the point of citation, rather than relying on researchers to notice a correction years later. That kind of infrastructure-level intervention complements, rather than replaces, institutional oversight.

    For research administrators, the actionable shift is from a compliance mindset (“train researchers, then police them”) to a design mindset: audit which internal metrics reward speed over rigour, resource integrity offices adequately, and make authorship and contribution as transparent as data availability statements already are. Consult the CASRAI Dictionary for precise definitions when drafting or updating institutional misconduct policy, and review authorship guidance where disputes over credit are a recurring source of allegations.

    None of this suggests misconduct is inevitable. It suggests that where institutions have reduced metrics pressure, resourced oversight and made contribution transparent, the same literature that identifies the causes also points to measurable, achievable prevention.