Scientific misconduct and the responsible conduct of research in science and economics

Abstract

Considered here are matters relating to the responsible conduct of research in economics and science in the United States for the last forty years. In science there was a “late 20th century wave” of scientific misconduct and then a “millennial wave”. For economics in the former era, episodes of honest error and replication failure occurred. Recently plagiarism and data manipulation have been reported. Overall few economists seem to fabricate data, but falsification of data, replication failure, and plagiarism occur. Furthermore, replication failure is the one thing that scientific misconduct and honest error have in common. In economics and compared to the sciences, there have been no misconduct hearings, no economist has been charged with a crime, nor has anyone served time in prison for scientific misconduct. Science and economics seem to be sufficiently self-corrective so that systemic science failure does not utterly thwart scientific progress in the long run.