Abstract
Scientific misconduct is believed to be on the increase as the media frequently report dramatic cases. Scientific societies, academies, publishers, and stakeholders in industry are all expressing growing concern. Public opinion and political leaders are consequently becoming skeptical about science as a provider of reliable knowledge. Yet spectacular headline news should not hide pernicious misbehaviors of a different sort which are more difficult to identify but may be even more dangerous for the scientific endeavor. Based on the biomedical research case, this paper addresses these issues. It identifies the procedures set up by stakeholders of research to contain misconduct, and develops hypotheses about how changes in the making of science impact scientific integrity.
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Declaration on Research Assessment, DORA http://www.ascb.org/dora/ (http://www.ascb.org/dora/ 2
1. Falsifying or “cooking” research data 2. Ignoring major aspects of human-subject requirement 3. Not properly disclosing involvement in firms whose products are based on one’s own research 4. Relationships with students, research subjects or clients that may be interpreted as questionable 5. Using another’s ideas without obtaining permission or giving due credit 6. Unauthorized use of confidential information in connection with one’s own research 7. Failing to present data that contradict one’s own previous research 8. Circumventing certain minor aspects of human-subject requirements 9. Overlooking others’ use of flawed data or questionable interpretation of data 10. Changing the design, methodology of results of a study in response to pressure from a funding source 11. Publishing the same data or results in two or more publications 12. Inappropriately assigning authorship credit 13. Withholding details of methodology or results in papers or proposals 14. Using inadequate or inappropriate research designs 15. Dropping observations or data points from analyses based on a gut feeling that they were inaccurate 16. Inadequate record keeping related to research projects. The most common behaviors are #16 (27.7%); #10 (15.5%) and #15 (15.3%).
www.wcrif.org/guidance/singapore-statement, 2010. See at the European level in the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (https://allea.org/code-of-conduct/, revised 2017), as well as in most European countries (see for instance, Charte française de déontologie des métiers de la recherche, 2015, https://www.hceres.fr/fr/CharteFrancaiseIntegriteScientifique).
https://www.reviewcommons.org/about/, accessed on the December 31, 2019
Ideal types synthesize “a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent, concrete individual phenomena … into a unified analytical construct” (Weber 1922/1949). They do not claim to describe reality but to help compare different ways of running research institutions.
SIGAPS scores (for Système d’Interrogation, de Gestion et d’Analyse des Publications Scientifique) are bibliometric indexes that record the publications of a given institution, research center, and individual researcher in PubMed. Publications are converted into scores, based on the IF of the journal, and the position of the researchers in the byline of each given paper. Budgets allocated by the Minister of Health are partly based on such scores and may represent a significant amount of money for some research labs.
Ideal types synthesize “a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent, concrete individual phenomena … into a unified analytical construct” (Weber 1922/1949). They do not claim to describe reality but to help compare different ways of running research institutions.
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Paradeise, C., Filliatreau, G. Scientific Integrity Matters. Minerva 59, 289–309 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-021-09440-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-021-09440-x