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Research Misconduct Makes Physicist Unworthy of Doctoral Degree

Volume 13, No. 1, December 2004

Committing research misconduct could lead to the revocation of your doctoral degree if institutions follow the action taken by a German university against the former Bell Labs physicist who reportedly fabricated data supporting a series of supposed  research breakthroughs.

Last June, the University of Konstanz revoked the doctoral degree granted to J. Hendrik Schon in 1998 and asked him to return his diploma because Schon had behaved “unworthily” by being involved in “the biggest data fabrication scandal in physics in the last 50 years” Professor Wolfgang Dieterich said in announcing the decision, according to Associated Press and New York Times reports.

“That was interpreted here in the context of science,” said Professor Dieterich, chairman of the physics department at Konstanz. “We decided to remove his doctorate credentials after our commission checked on the conclusions drawn by the external commission in the United States, and noted that several scientific journals had also retracted some of his published work.”

The university in southern Germany claimed a legal right to rescind the degree even though its investigation concluded that Schon did not commit misconduct in his doctoral research.

Universities in the United States and Germany have revoked degrees when research misconduct was discovered in theses or dissertations that supported the degrees but this may be the first case where an institution revoked a doctoral degree because research misconduct was committed during a research career.