respond-to-a-research-misconduct-allegation

name	respond-to-a-research-misconduct-allegation
category	school
description	Respond to a research misconduct allegation through human protection, independent authority, evidence custody, fair process, research-record correction, and verified reform. Use when fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, interference, or related integrity concerns may affect people and published findings.

respond-to-a-research-misconduct-allegation

Protect people, evidence, and the research record before defending reputations.

When to use

• Use for alleged fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, authorship abuse, evidence destruction, interference, retaliation, undisclosed conflicts, or serious protocol divergence.
• Activate qualified research-integrity, safeguarding, legal, privacy, information-security, records, sponsor, journal, regulator, and subject-matter authority.

Preconditions

• Establish an independent case authority, alternate, conflict and recusal process, safe reporting route, confidentiality boundary, and stop authority.
• Define allegations, people, studies, data, samples, systems, publications, funding, jurisdictions, policies, deadlines, and immediate risks.
• Separate protective action from findings and preserve fair notice, response, support, and appeal.

Procedure

Complete intake and human protection, independent evidence inquiry, fair investigation and findings, and record correction and reform.

1. Open a research integrity case timeline for allegations, reports, people, studies, evidence, access, risks, decisions, communications, and deadlines.
2. Protect reporters, participants, staff, students, patients, communities, animals, and ongoing work from retaliation or avoidable harm without treating allegations as proven.
3. Appoint an independent evidence custodian to preserve immutable data, code, notebooks, samples, instruments, images, drafts, submissions, reviews, emails, logs, devices, credentials, consent, approvals, and provenance.
4. Establish a multisite preservation federation before substantive notice: appoint an unconflicted local custodian at each site; issue timestamped holds for systems, devices, samples, backups, consent, logs, communications, and deletion schedules; and record authority, privacy, transfer limits, clocks, acquisition, hashes, and custody.
5. Preserve originals locally where required, provide verified copies or signed custody attestations centrally, prohibit implicated people from preservation certification, reconcile every site manifest, minimize transferred identifiers, and record missing evidence as a custody gap.
6. Hash digital evidence, record physical custody, separate originals from working copies, restrict accused or conflicted access proportionately, and log every access.
7. Resolve reviewer conflicts, expertise, funding, prior involvement, reporting lines, confidentiality, and publication independence.
8. Decompose the allegation into testable claims and distinguish policy-defined misconduct from error, disagreement, poor practice, and unresolved concern.
9. Conduct a bounded inquiry to decide whether formal investigation criteria are met, preserving reasons and prohibited inference.
10. Give affected people specific notice, relevant evidence, safe support, reasonable response, and an opportunity to identify contrary evidence.
11. Reconstruct collection, transformation, analysis, image, authorship, protocol, approval, submission, review, and publication history.
12. Test provenance, raw-to-result lineage, statistical and image anomalies, reproducibility, access, timestamps, version history, and alternative explanations.
13. Determine each allegation under the applicable evidence standard and policy, recording facts, credibility, limits, dissent, and independent approval.
14. Trace affected grants, theses, datasets, participants, decisions, collaborators, repositories, patents, presentations, preprints, papers, reviews, and downstream citations.
15. Coordinate lawful notices, corrections, expressions of concern, retractions, participant protection, funder or regulator action, and employment or academic processes without predetermination.
16. Preserve appeal, correct the record visibly, verify propagation, remediate controls, and monitor retaliation plus recurrence.

Failure plan

• If evidence is being destroyed or systems are compromised, activate authorized independent preservation immediately.
• If the institution cannot provide independent authority, refer the matter through the applicable external process.
• If participant or public harm is imminent, restrict affected use while preserving evidence and transparent interim notice.
• If evidence remains insufficient, record an unresolved or unsubstantiated result without calling it exoneration or misconduct.

Worked example

A multicenter medical paper is challenged after duplicated images, impossible timestamps, missing consent records, unexplained patient exclusions, inconsistent raw files, a disputed author contribution, and alleged retaliation against a junior reporter. The institution protects people and participants, freezes affected use, preserves cross-site evidence, appoints independent expertise, reconstructs raw-to-publication lineage, gives fair response, corrects every derivative, and verifies reform.

Done

• A research integrity case timeline verifies allegations, protection, independent authority, multisite preservation, local and central custody, privacy and transfer limits, conflicts, deadlines, decisions, communications, and fair process
• An evidence, study, result, and publication reconciliation proves provenance, raw-to-result lineage, consent, analysis, authorship, affected outputs, findings, uncertainty, and downstream scope
• A record-correction and reform report demonstrates notices, participant protection, correction or retraction propagation, appeal, anti-retaliation monitoring, control remediation, and independent closeout