In the past two decades, individual explanations of scientific misconduct (‘bad apples’) have increasingly given way to systemic explanations (‘bad systems’). Where did this interest in systemic factors (publication pressure, competition for research funding) come from? Given that research ethicists often present their interventions as responses to scientific misconduct, this article tests the hypothesis that these systemic explanations were triggered by high-visibility cases of scientific norm violation. It does so by examining why Dutch scientists in 2011 explained Diederik Stapel’s grand-scale data fabrication largely in systemic terms, whereas only fifteen years earlier, in the René Diekstra affair (1996), such explanations had been close to absent. Drawing on a wealth of historical sources, the article suggests that cases like Stapel’s as such do not explain why early 21st-century commentators exchanged individual explanations for systemic ones. Only against the background of an existing discourse of criticism of the science system, developed in the 1990s and 2000s in response to rapidly increasing competition for research funding, could the Stapel affair achieve notoriety as an example of how systemic factors provoke bad conduct.

在过去的二十年中，对科学不端行为（“坏苹果”）的个别解释已逐渐被系统性解释（“坏系统”）取代。对系统性因素（出版压力，研究经费竞争）的兴趣来自何处？鉴于研究伦理学家通常将其干预表现为对科学不端行为的回应，因此本文检验了以下假设：这些系统性解释是由违反科学规范的可见性案例触发的。通过检查为什么荷兰的科学家在2011年解释Diederik Stapel的大规模数据伪造主要是系统地解释这一点，而仅仅在15年前的RenéDiekstra事件（1996年）中，这种解释就几乎没有了。文章借鉴了许多历史资料，指出像Stapel's这样的案件因此，这并不能解释为什么21世纪初的评论员将个人的解释换成系统的解释。只有在1990年代和2000年代针对对科研经费的竞争日益激烈而发展起来的，对科学体系进行批评的现有论调的背景下，Stapel事件才成为臭名昭著的例子，说明系统性因素是如何引发不良行为的。