Maikel Pellens

Guilt by Association: How Scientific Misconduct Harms Prior Collaborators

Recent highly publicized cases of scientific misconduct have raised concerns about its consequences for academic careers. Previous and anecdotal evidence suggests that these reach far beyond the fraudulent scientist and her career, affecting coauthors and institutions. Here we show that the negative effects of scientific misconduct spill over to uninvolved prior collaborators: compared to a control group, prior collaborators of misconducting scientists, who have no link to the misconduct case, are cited 8 to 9% less afterwards. We suggest that the mechanism underlying this phenomenon is stigmatization by mere association. The result suggests that scientific misconduct generates large indirect costs in the form of mistrust against a wider range of research findings than was previously assumed. The broad fallout of misconduct implies that potential whistleblowers might be disinclined to make their concerns public in order to protect their own reputation and career.

Mapping the regional embeddedness of the NMP programme: Final report of the project "RTD-NMP-2014-Mapping"

The aim of this study is to analyse how research and innovation activities, funded by the Nanosciences and Nanotechnologies, Materials, New Production Technologies (NMP) and the Industrial Biotechnology (B) themes in the Seventh Framework Programme for Research (FP7) (together: FP7 NMBP), are embedded at a regional level, how the activities linked to local and regional networks and clusters, and to what extent and in what way these activities impacted at the regional level. This final report presents the summary of the main elements of the study: Mapping and Regression analysis, Network analysis, Case studies of seven regions and the Synthesis. This report closes with Conclusions and Policy recommendations for European as well as regional policy-makers.