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Research Ethics and Intellectual Property Rights

Topic 5.3 of Research Ethics and Intellectual Property Rights

Research Misconduct: Fabrication, Falsification, and Plagiarism

The three categories of research misconduct — fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism — illustrated with security-specific examples including a classifier retested under better conditions and reported as if it was always right, and the UGC 2018 four-level similarity penalty table for theses.

~20 min total·4 quadrants of structured content

By the end of this topic, you will

Define fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism (FFP) and give a security-domain example of each
Explain why malware's own sandbox-evasion behaviour is an analogy for falsification in experiment design
Apply the UGC 2018 four-level plagiarism penalty table to a given similarity percentage and state the required consequence
Explain why a researcher can commit falsification without manually entering false numbers — and what that means for how methodology sections must be written

Quadrant 1 · e-Tutorial

Video lectures and walkthroughs

Video content coming soon.

Quadrant 2 · e-Content

Articles and case studies

research-methodology

Research Misconduct: Fabrication, Falsification, and Plagiarism

Most research-integrity offices organise misconduct into three categories abbreviated FFP. What makes the security-domain versions worth studying separately is that the downstream consequences — defences that do not work, benchmarks that cannot be replicated — affect people who never read the paper that contained the misconduct.

8 min read

Quadrant 3 · Web Resources

Downloadable material and curated external links

Web resources coming soon.

Quadrant 4 · Self-Assessment

Test your knowledge — earn a certificate on first pass

Assessment coming soon.