Should academic misconduct be catalogued? Proposed US database sparks debate

For decades, academic institutions have struggled with how to prevent researchers who have committed misconduct from securing jobs at new universities while hiding the bad behaviour. A proposal published today in the journal Science¹ offers a solution, at least in the United States: creating a national database of people found guilty of data fabrication, workplace harassment and more, that would be accessed by research institutions before making new hires.

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But scientists who spoke to Nature are divided over whether this centralized, confidential list would solve the problem or generate new ones.

Michael Lauer, one of the proposal’s authors, says that bad actors frequently evade accountability by resigning during an ongoing investigation at their university, or by agreeing to leave and sign a non-disparagement agreement with their institution, such that neither party can speak publicly about the incident.

This potentially enables a person to get hired by another university, which might not be aware of the previous misconduct, says Lauer, who for about ten years ran the extramural research programme at the US National Institutes of Health, a major funder of biomedical science. “We should make it much more difficult for offending scientists to evade accountability without there being appropriate transparency.”

A legal requirement

There is precedent for such a database: in the 1980s, the medical field faced a crisis, in which physicians who had engaged in misconduct were relocating across US state lines to escape their reputations, says Mark Barnes, a lawyer at Ropes & Gray in Boston, Massachusetts, who co-authored the proposal.

This prompted the US Congress to establish the National Practitioner Data Bank in 1990, which now holds over 1.9 million reports of malpractice, fraud and medical license suspensions. US hospitals are required by law to check this system before granting medical privileges and must repeat the query every two years to ensure the records of their staff members are up to date.

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For the latest proposal to become a reality, Congress would need to take similar action to create a database, Lauer says. This way, US research institutions would be required by law to report misconduct cases to the repository and also query it periodically, including when hiring new researchers, he adds. The database would contain only instances where an investigation concluded and officially found research misconduct, not when someone has been accused of misconduct without any finding, he says.

Even when an institution concludes an investigation and finds misconduct, it is typically not compelled to share those results publicly, and rarely does so, Barnes says. That’s because universities fear they might be “sucked into litigation” if a scientist accuses them of defamation for advertising to potential employers about their misconduct record, he adds. “Fear can result in saying nothing — and so the cycle repeats itself, and the new employing institution is left flying blind.”

Sometimes misconduct cases are made public by federal oversight agencies, such as the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) at the NIH’s parent agency. Universities are required to report research-integrity concerns to such offices when scientists have received federal funds for their experiments. These agencies can then decide whether to investigate the alleged misconduct further and apply sanctions. But they often have few resources for handling every case, says Lisa Lee, senior associate vice president for research and innovation at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. ORI, for example, released only two findings of research misconduct in 2025.