As a researcher in academia, likely as not you work for a Principal Investigator (PI), who also mages several other researchers, and your contract will typically be fixed at 1-3 years, after which you need to generate more grant income from an awarding body or charity, or you need to leave and find another job.
With very few exceptions, taking the latter road is taken to mean that your PI is allowed to airbrush your efforts out of the history of the group's work. This manifest itself most commonly in scientific papers published after you have left the group which revolve, partly or wholly, around research work you did, but which do not credit you as a co-author.
"So what?" I hear you cry.
Publication of research articles, particularly in leading Journals, is the number one metric by which the work performance is assessed in academia, the other main ones being grant income generated and the "h index", a statistic which ranks you according to how many papers you publish, what the "impact factor" of the journals are in which you publish and the number of other papers which have cited your work.
To see your work published by former PI's and colleagues without attribution or acknowledgement of your contribution amounts to theft of Intellectual Property (IP), but it has been widely accepted as the norm, but one which presents the wronged party with a dilemma. If one were to challenge the papers either at the institution level or by contacting the journal's editor in chief to point out that one had not been given due credit for the work described in a paper, the very best outcome is that the paper gets withdrawn, a shameful exercise in which nobody wins, a classic example of a lose-lose situation. On the other hand, the longer the unethical practise of mis-attribution goes unreported, the more widespread and acceptable it seems to become. In the era of "open science", the public are assured that the research process is transparent and above reproach, whereas in actual fact the mechanisms of obfuscation have merely become more sophisticated.
Another common conceit in academia, this time in palaeo-biology, is the way in which "cartels" of scientific researchers might all subconsciously collude to ignore a known weakness in a widely used scientific technique because it would undermine the credibility of everyone's published work.
A good example of this is the way archaeological samples of mitochondrial DNA are grouped into categories called haplogroups (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup) based on a limited number of DNA mutations, in which the mutations present or absent define the group, all based on a DNA sequence called the Cambridge Reference Sequence (CRS).
This type of classification ignores the bulk of the DNA sequence data and can thus be very misleading, but it is very widely used in palaeo-biology to track the migration of humans out of their ice-age refugia to recolonise the European continent, and also to trace the highly controversial diffusion of Neolithic farming cultures from the fertile crescent. Everyone in the field knows that using haplogroups loses or ignores so much information that it isn't nearly as powerful as comparing the entire DNA sequences from different individuals, but ancient DNA is usually quite heavily degraded and the number of specimens is very low (ranging typically from one to about fifty). The use of haplogroups purports to obviate these limitations, but it is generally ignored that this comes at a cost in fidelity and results that often mislead or muddy the picture at least as much as they illuminate.
Science is rotten to the core, driven as much by politics (PI's going after professorships), money and the way it always flows to "fashionable" or "sexy" big-science, blue sky topics, as it is by the high-minded ideals the scientists would like the public to think they have.
