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Social norms, social control and sanctions are an essential tool to generate social order. According to the Mertonian principle, social norms preserve the advancement of knowledge and the ideal of truth seeking in science. Therefore, researchers are expected to subordinate their personal interest to the ideal of truth seeking science. Yet, these collective goods often conflict with researchers’ individual aspirations for reputation, peer-recognition and career advancement.

In recent years, prominent fraud cases such as Diederik Stapel, Jan Hendrik Schön or Joachim Boldt were uncovered, showing that common rules of social and self-control failed and raising the scientific community’s awareness for fraud and manipulation in science. Often, the self-healing powers of science are stressed. However, it is likely that these cases are not only a few bad apples in an otherwise healthy scientific system. These cases may be symptoms of a ‘publish or perish’ system, where researchers face a high pressure to present original, novel and innovative contributions and, furthermore, a highly incentivized publication market with citations as the coveted currency and exchange rates increasing with journal impact factor. Such a system may generate incentives for questionable research practices (QRP) and scientific misconduct. Also, it misleads honest research such that publishers and reviewers may prefer manuscripts reporting novel and significant results and that researchers, in anticipation, do not even submit manuscripts with negative or insignificant results in the first place. Such selection strategies bias the published scientific literature by overly significant and hypothesis-confirming results, misleading or at least slowing down the advancement of knowledge.

There are already approaches to overcome this dilemma such as preregistration of empirical studies, results-free reviews and changing publishing policies of journals. However, it is still up for evaluation how effective these approaches are or can be in the future.
This workshop welcomes empirical or theoretical contributions addressing QRP in general, scientific misconduct, publication bias, the related file drawer effect, methods to detect and prevent scientific misconduct and related topics.
This includes research that
- discusses and investigates features of the scientific system that may promote misconduct,
- explores the efficiency and efficacy of the review and replication system as a form of organized skepticism,
- assesses the prevalence of QRP and scientific misconduct,
- develops and/or tests methods to detect scientific misconduct, or
- deals with attempts or solutions to overcome the dilemma of a biased scientific literature.