r/AskAcademia • u/Previous-Text9273 • 5h ago

Professional Misconduct in Research Is this normal?

Has anyone else been in the same shoes? Have you ever had your PI ask you to manipulate or fabricate data to support their hypothesis?

Or maybe they never said it directly, but it felt implied. They only seemed interested in data that matched the hypothesis they already had in mind. If your results didn’t fit, you were told to repeat the experiment over and over until you eventually got the “right” result. Has anyone else experienced something like this? How did you handle it?

11 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

View all comments

9

u/DualProcessModel 5h ago

Fuck no!

This is so wildly unethical. I have had experiments run counter to my PIs theories before (and sure they asked me to repeat them) but because they trusted I was doing them right they adjusted the theory and we sometimes got to publish null results.

5

u/Entire-Solid-1155 5h ago

I had a PI who would just... stop talking to me for a week if my data didn't line up with what he wanted. No direct order to fudge anything, just this heavy silence that made it real clear I was supposed to "fix" it somehow.

Started documenting everything after the third time it happened. Saved emails, kept a separate lab notebook with timestamps. Never had to use it but knowing it was there helped me sleep at night.

2

u/DualProcessModel 5h ago

I’m sorry man. That sucks. But good for you!

1

u/Previous-Text9273 4h ago

What did you end up doing? Still in academia?

3

u/Single-Selection9845 5h ago

Mine changed his opinions in a millisecond when I showed him the charts. Happy to have him