About one in 12 PhD students would publish fraudulent results if it helped them to get ahead in academia, a study suggests.
In an international study that surveyed almost 800 doctoral candidates, researchers presented PhD researchers with a scenario in which data had been fabricated and asked whether they would be happy to proceed to publication.
In the first part of the study, involving 440 PhD candidates recruited from social science or psychology departments in Dutch universities, almost all spotted the use of fraudulent data but 8 per cent said they would publish if they felt under pressure to do so, explains the study, published in Frontiers in Psychology.
A replication study involving 198 PhD candidates from the medical and psychology faculties at a Dutch university found similar results, while a third study that polled 127 social science PhD students in Belgium found that 13.4 per cent would publish the dodgy data.
“Many of those we interviewed came up with good arguments for publishing what they knew was fabricated data, such as ‘if this is what it takes to finish my PhD’,” said the study’s lead author, Rens van de Schoot, professor of statistics at Utrecht University.