Table 3 Quotations per disciplinary field to illustrate the content of the research misbehaviour themes

Sloppy reporting

‘Take things that are reported as a decrease of 80% in tumour rate. Well, when you attempt to repeat the experiment you get a 60% decrease so obviously their 80% was the most positive result from all the times they tried…’—PhD student

Insufficient supervision

‘If you have a PhD student and you completely throw her in at the deep end, surely you increase the chance of irresponsible research’—Full professor

Inflexible reviewers

‘So everything that is novel or different, it requires an lot of effort to get that accepted in the, in the journals, due to most likely also rigid reviewers’—Assistant professor

Review misconduct

‘I had it once with a journal editor who was being really difficult about a publication of mine. And then he managed to get his own publication [with the same idea] in before mine’—Full professor

Team spirit missing

‘Research is no one man show, you have to teach them [PhD students] to also let go, it is not just theirs. The same holds for what I do, it is not just mine, it is a team effort...’—Assistant professor

Sloppy reviewing

‘You’re on a grant review panel and you’re judging someone whom you have a personal or professional relationship with. You’re an editor of a journal and you don’t recuse yourself for a conflict of interest with the author of a paper’—Associate professor

Sloppy methods and statistics

‘What is so horrible about these strategies is, post-hoc storytelling, salami slicing, is how you win the game, this is how you become a professor, this what you should do. Some professors even tell you, like: this is what you should do’—Postdoctoral researcher

Insufficient supervision

‘Supervisors exploiting their PhD students. I think that can be sort of extended into any type of harassment; sexual, personal, mental harassment, whatever it is. Also about any type of power relationship that there is and… that he demands co-authorships, that supervisors say… I want to be on this paper, I am on this paper, not as a question but, you know, as a statement...’ —Postdoctoral researcher

Uncritical reviewing

‘What you see is that, there is no review culture, in which the standards of what constitutes good and bad publications are adequately present, to filter out actual hoaxes’—Full professor

Lack of supervision

‘I have a PhD student who got sent to me from abroad… I said well, when did you last speak to your supervisor? And he said no, no, no, because you can answer my questions better, the last couple of months I didn’t, because I was saving it up for you… While the actual supervision who will get… the credits is actually not an expert.’ —Assistant professor