Norms and Deviant Behavior in Science

Abstract

The current flurry of scholarly interest in fraud, plagiarism, and other forms of deviant behavior in science is most welcome. The subject is still under-studied, with only a handful of analytic and empirical investigations existing even now. Indeed, when I searched in the middle 1970s for pertinent literature on deviance in science, I soon discovered that since Charles Babbage's Reflections on the Decline of Science in England,' written 150 years ago, the main sociological analysis of its etiology was Robert Merton's study of the normative structure of science and priority disputes.2 In the priorities paper, Merton examined the connections between science's abiding emphasis on making original discoveries, scientists' concern with recognition, and the ways in which these lead them to deviant and near-deviant behavior: to vigorous assertions of their own priority, to accusations of plagiarism, and, in the extreme, to committing fraud. It also did not take long to discover that any empirical evidence on various forms of deviance in science was hard to come by. Thus, my 1977 article, which has provoked Warren Schmaus' commentary, was intended to move forward the study of deviant behavior in science: to extend the theoretical bases for understanding its sources; to lay out a problematics for its study; and to suggest, on the basis of available evidence, what an epidemiology of such deviant behavior-its in-

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