Stunned by two recent high-profile cases of scientific misconduct by physicists, the American Physical Society council has adopted “updated and expanded” ethics guidelines that clarify the responsibilities of coauthors of scientific papers, urge a stronger emphasis on ethics education, and call for all research institutions to follow the Federal Policy on Research Misconduct. The new guidelines, developed by the ethics subcommittee of the APS panel on public affairs, are much more direct than the previous 1991 guidelines in addressing the issues of scientific misconduct and fraudulent research.
Development of the new guidelines was prompted by two investigations—one at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and the other at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—that determined two physicists, in unrelated cases, had misrepresented and fabricated data. The physicists, Victor Ninov of LBNL and Jan Hendrik Schön at Bell Labs, were dismissed for misconduct (see Physics Today, September 2002, page 15, and November...
