MIT is committed to fostering and maintaining a culture of integrity in research and to preventing situations and behaviors that could lead to allegations of research misconduct.
Defining Research Integrity
Practicing integrity in research and scholarship means planning, proposing, performing, reporting, and reviewing research in accordance with core values that help to ensure that the research enterprise advances scientific and scholarly knowledge that is reliable. As described by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, these core values include objectivity, honesty, openness, fairness, accountability, and stewardship.
Defining Research Misconduct at MIT
Participants in the research and academic enterprise stray from the norms and appropriate practices of science and other scholarly inquiry when they engage in research misconduct. Research misconduct is defined in MIT’s Policies & Procedures § 10.1 as fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, or deliberate interference in research activities conducted at MIT or by MIT faculty, staff, fellows, students, and others with MIT appointments elsewhere as part of their MIT-related duties or activities:
- Fabrication is making up data or results and recording or reporting them.
- Falsification is manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes, or changing or omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the Research Record.
- Plagiarism is the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit.
- Deliberate interference is intentionally causing material harm to the research or scholarly work of others and may include damaging or destroying the property of others, such as research equipment or supplies; disrupting active experiments; or altering or deleting products of research, including data.
- Research activities includes proposing, conducting, reviewing, or reporting the results of research or other scholarly inquiry.
Research misconduct does not include:
- Honest error
- Differences of opinion
- Authorship disputes
Updated April 15, 2025