On the Scope and Typology of ‘Research Misconduct’: The Gaze of the General Medical Council, 1990–2015

Violations of research integrity are understood to have wide-ranging negative consequences for the trustworthiness of science and the health of the public. My goal in this article is not to cause further outrage about research misconduct. Instead, this article queries research conducts expressly as seen through the eyes of a specific regulator and over a specific period (1990–2015). The result is an assessment of the strengths and limitations of the application of the General Medical Council’s (GMC’s) fitness to practice model in this area. It provides with an opportunity to shift the analytical attention back onto the existing typology of research misconduct—the classic Fabrication, Falsification, and Plagiarism or FFP—point to its deficiencies, and imagine how it could be refined in light of what the fitness to practice casework tells us about concrete, context-specific instances of research misconduct committed by medical practitioners. In the literature, there has been neither a systematic examination of research behaviours as they get apprehended—when they do—through the lens of the British medical professional regulator, nor a case-based reflection on whether the existing frameworks and typologies used in the scientific community describe adequately the practices of medical research misconduct. The article aims to fill these two gaps.