ABSTRACT
Many of the studies of scientific misconduct and the responsible conduct of research have little if any systematic framework for understanding those phenomena. Science is an economic phenomenon. Scientists as individuals working in a professional research community have incentives and motivation, and they face a structured pattern of organizations and social institutions with embedded economic and financial constraints. This chapter aims to provide an account for several basic aspects of science from an economic perspective. Creating an economic portrayal of fundamentals of science inevitably leads to an account of how different some of its processes are from others in the economy. Most disciplines in the sciences and social sciences begin with a simplified but still incomplete conception of the research methods of scientific practice as inductive inquiry.
