Abstract: In recent years, various scientific misconduct incidents have occurred frequently at home and abroad, and have
shown a tendency of continuous spread. The academic atmosphere of research organizations becomes worrisome. Scientific misconducts refer to the behaviors of individuals or teams engaged in scientific research that violate scientific norms or social ethics. Although prior studies have shown that moral quality, ethical standards, organizational systems, and personality characteristics are important factors that trigger scientific misconducts, the pressure of scientific research performance faced by scientific researchers may also intensify the occurrence of scientific misconducts. High-intensity scientific research may make them lose their vitality and
become more prone to physical and emotional exhaustion. Based on ego depletion theory, we constructed a moderated mediation
model to explore the mechanism of scientific emotional exhaustion on scientific misconducts, as well as the role of self-regulation
impairment and organizational silence.
To test our hypotheses, we collected data from three universities in China and selected doctoral students from different research
teams. The data was collected at three time points. At Time 1, we collected scientific emotional exhaustion and demographic
variables. After a month later, we collected self-regulation impairment and organizational silence at Time 2. Also, a month later, we
collected scientific misconduct at Time 3. We scrutinized and eliminated the questionnaires with missing data and removed the team
sample which contributed fewer than three participants. Thus, our final sample consisted of 320 doctoral students from 38 research
teams. Before testing hypotheses, we assessed the discriminant validity of variables in our study through conducted a confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) and examined the common method variance. Then we converged organizational silence to team level and used Mplus7.4 to test our hypotheses. The results showed that: scientific emotional exhaustion had a significant positive relationship with scientific misconducts; scientific emotional exhaustion had a significant positive relationship with self-regulation impairment; self-regulation impairment had a significant positive relationship with scientific misconducts, and also mediated the relationship between scientific emotional exhaustion and scientific misconducts; the positive relationship between self-regulation impairment and scientific misconducts is moderated
by organizational silence, such that the relationship will be stronger when organizational silence is higher; organizational silence
moderated the mediating effect of self-regulation impairment on the relationship between scientific emotional exhaustion and scientific
misconducts, such that the mediating effect will be stronger when organizational silence is higher.
Those conclusions enrich the scientific misconduct literature, and the main theoretical contributions are as follows. First, we explain
the effects of scientific emotional exhaustion on scientific misconducts based on ego depletion theory. Exploring the mediating
role of self-regulation impairment is helpful to expand our understanding about the psychological mechanism of scientific misconducts.
Second, by demonstrating organizational silence as a crucial boundary condition that moderates the effects of scientific emotional exhaustion,
we strengthen our cognition of ego depletion theory from personal characteristic to organizational context. Beyond these theoretical
contributions, the results also provide practical implications for preventing scientific misconducts. First, research organizations
should optimize their scientific research management system to relieve excessive scientific pressure and respect scientific laws when
designing. Second, scientific researchers can strengthen the ability of self-regulation and timely supplement their own psychological resources
with external training and learning. Finally, it is necessary to reverse the culture of“Mianzi orientation”and“Renqing orientation”,
in order to create a harmonious atmosphere for voice behavior and actively maintain the reputation of the scientific community.

Key words: scientific emotional exhaustion, scientific misconduct, self-regulation impairment, organizational silence