Recent news about procedural misconduct by scientists is easy to find. However, searches of JSTOR uncovered zero articles about misconduct in scientific research from 1900 to 1950. Such frauds must surely have existed, but the subject was not conceptualized and explored in open publications.

From 1950 to the present, 40 articles addressed the related problems. An obvious upswing occurred after 1987. Gale CENGAGE yielded 56 titles, many of those reports of headline news about Jan Hendrik Schön and other immediacies. On the other hand, if you search via Google or Bing for "research misconduct" or "misconduct in science" etc., there is no shortage of popular news stories and formal reports. The New York Times Articles database offers embarrassingly many such stories.

Police chiefs know the easy generalization that 80% of your problems come from 20% of your addresses regardless of the neighborhood. Crime is a universal problem. Nonetheless, variations in crime statistics show that predation and fraud are more common in some cities and states and nations than in others. Harms flourish where they are wanted. So, while fraud in science research is known across all studies, it is now most common in health and medicine.

Tremendous funding is one factor. Willy Sutton robbed banks because that's where the money was.

And to be fair, living things are more complex than rocks and stars, so experimental results can be harder to duplicate. Not all researchers have the same finesse; and it is easy to believe that you have it, but your critics do not.

The causal factors may be the pressure for results, the huge and easy funding for such work, and a desire to believe your own results, coupled with a faith in altruistic ends that justify any means.

But the rational choice theory of crime stands against such excuses and denials. According to the theory of crime based on objective psycho-epistemology, criminals act from the lack of thought. When pressed later, words come out of their mouths, often generated by an intuitively correct feeling for what the interrogator wants to hear. They do not mean it.

The Office of Research Integrity of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports on its findings. Defrauding the federal government is a federal crime, no surprise in that. Every university has some similar "institutional review board" for human and life science experiments. No similar agencies assure integrity in the physical sciences.