You are doing an experiment sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, a U. S. federal agency. In your experiment, you are testing the impact of a new method of exposure to chlorofluorocarbons to lung tissue using low-dose spiral computerized tomography. The protocol you are using was already approved and requires you to screen 200 subjects. You have completed 190 subjects and need to do just ten more. However, it is time for spring break and you really want to go with your friends. You decide to use the date for the 195 subjects and extrapolate the results for the remaining 10.
Look up what "research misconduct" is according to the US government. Is this research misconduct? Why or why not? Would it be misconduct if, because of sloppy records keeping, you actually thought you had completed 200 subjects only later realized your error of having completed just 190?
The story gets a little confused but if you have 190 subjects and use that data to "extrapolate" data points for 10 nonexistent subjects; then Yes it's falsification of data and therefore misconduct. Same if you do it by accident. If an accident I imagine some of the consequences would depend on at what point you realize and correct the error.
I agree with Douglas, you can't just add data for 10 non-existent participants. If your sample is representative enough of the population you are studying, then you may be able to generalize the findings, which is a very different proposition. I don't really understant how such a mistake can occure, however if you realize it before publishing any results you should be fine.
Either way it constitutes misconduct. If for some reason you must end a study (usually not going off with friends) before reaching the maximum subjects/samples, then you use only the data you have and list the correct number of subjects/samples. Any other reporting would be misconduct. The reason it is misconduct is that if you purposefully mislead you have not done good science and may actual harm others. If done by accident it usually means that there was not attention paid to all the necessary functions involved in the research itself and this may also give misleading and sometimes dangerous information.
As said above: you have to be honest. If you write that you did 200 tests while in fact you did only 190 and fabricated 10 test results based on extrapolation, then that's misconduct.
But even if your study is incomplete, your findings can still be publishable - in particular if you have very interesting data (e.g. nearly all positive or nearly all negative). You will have to emphasize that the size of the test group doesn't satisfy the minimum requirements, but still the publication can be interesting if you have observed a significant effect or a null result. In the results section you simply give the results of the 190 tests and you explicitly state that this is not enough to meet formal requirements, but in the discussion section you could for example argue (using statistical analysis) that even if you would have done 10 additional tests with a negative result, then still the conclusion would have been that a significant effect has been observed (e.g. because you have already 180 positives out of 190 tests). Although minimum standards are not met, such a paper might yield a motivation to repeat the test at a larger scale.
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