Scientific misconduct is the violation of the standard codes of scholarly conduct and ethical behavior in scientific research. It is an intentional or gross negligence leading to fabrication of the scientific message or a false credit or emphasis given to a scientist. In this sense, scientific misconduct is a premeditated, deliberate and intentional distortion of the research process by fabrication of data, text, hypothesis, or methods from another researcher's manuscript form or publication; or distortion of the research process in other ways.

The consequences of scientific misconduct can be severe at a personal level for both the person responsible and any individual who exposes it. In addition there are public health implications attached to the promotion of medical or other interventions based on dubious research findings.

Forms of scientific misconduct include:
fabrication ? the publication of deliberately false or misleading research, often subdivided into:
Obfuscation ? the omission of critical data or results. Example: Only reporting positive outcomes and not adverse outcomes.
Fabrication ? the actual making up of research data and (the intent of) publishing them, referred to as "drylabbing" in some circles.
Falsification ? manipulation of research data and processes in order to reflect or prevent a certain result.
Bare assertions ? making entirely unsubstantiated claims
Bogus references--references are included to give a work appear widespread acceptance, but are actually fake, and/or do not support the argument.
Plagiarism ? the act of taking credit (or attempting to take credit) for the work of another.
Citation plagiarism ? willful or negligent failure to appropriately credit other or prior discoverers, so as to give an improper impression of priority.
Self-plagiarism ? or multiple publication of the same content with different titles and/or in different journals is sometimes also considered misconduct; scientific journals explicitly ask authors not to do this.
The violation of ethical standards regarding human and animal experiments ? such as the standard that a human subject of the experiment must give informed consent to the experiment.
Ghostwriting ? the process where someone other than the named author(s) makes a major contribution.
Conversely, research misconduct is not limited to NOT listing authorship, but also includes the conferring authorship on those that have not made substantial contributions to the research. This is done by senior researchers who muscle their way onto the papers of inexperienced junior researchers as well as others that stack authorship in an effort to guarantee publication.
Misappropriation of data ? Literally stealing the work and results of others and publishing as to make it appear the author had performed all the work under which the data was obtained.