Ethics and Physics

I. J. GENERAL

Raleigh

Workshop; Research Ethics Education: Beyond RCR Training Workshop; 2007

Research misconduct is a term that was not heard of in the physical sciences until not so long ago. But, unfortunately, in the last decade several cases of research misconduct have been brought to light, proving that physicist are as likely to incur in some form of unethical behavior as anybody else. Here, we will review a few cases and study the ways in which they could have been avoided. We will also study the meaning of the peer review mechanism that many scientific journals use, and show how sometimes it is subverted, with very negative results.