responsible conduct of research

I want to apologize for the infrequency of my posting lately. Much of it can be laid at the feet of end-of-term grading, although today I've been occupied with a meeting of scientists at different career stages to which I was invited to speak about some topics I discuss here. (More about that later.) June will have more substantive ethics-y posts, honest! Indeed, to tide you over, I want to ask for your responses to a case study I wrote for the final exam for my "Ethics in Science" class. First, the case: Peter is a graduate student in a laboratory that does a variety of research projects…
In the last post, we looked at a piece of research on how easy it is to clean up the scientific literature in the wake of retractions or corrections prompted by researcher misconduct in published articles. Not surprisingly, in the comments on that post there was some speculation about what prompts researchers to commit scientific misconduct in the first place. As it happens, I've been reading a paper by Mark S. Davis, Michelle Riske-Morris, and Sebastian R. Diaz, titled "Causal Factors Implicated in Research Misconduct: Evidence from ORI Case Files", that tries to get a handle on that…