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Ranking major and minor research misbehaviors: results from a survey among participants of four World Conferences on Research Integrity

BACKGROUND: Codes of conduct mainly focus on research misconduct that takes the form of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. However, at the aggregate level, lesser forms of research misbehavior may be more important due to their much higher prevalence. Little is known about what the most fre...

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Autores principales: Bouter, Lex M., Tijdink, Joeri, Axelsen, Nils, Martinson, Brian C., ter Riet, Gerben
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5803629/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29451551
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s41073-016-0024-5
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author Bouter, Lex M.
Tijdink, Joeri
Axelsen, Nils
Martinson, Brian C.
ter Riet, Gerben
author_facet Bouter, Lex M.
Tijdink, Joeri
Axelsen, Nils
Martinson, Brian C.
ter Riet, Gerben
author_sort Bouter, Lex M.
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Codes of conduct mainly focus on research misconduct that takes the form of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. However, at the aggregate level, lesser forms of research misbehavior may be more important due to their much higher prevalence. Little is known about what the most frequent research misbehaviors are and what their impact is if they occur. METHODS: A survey was conducted among 1353 attendees of international research integrity conferences. They were asked to score 60 research misbehaviors according to their views on and perceptions of the frequency of occurrence, preventability, impact on truth (validity), and impact on trust between scientists on 5-point scales. We expressed the aggregate level impact as the product of frequency scores and truth, trust and preventability scores, respectively. We ranked misbehaviors based on mean scores. Additionally, relevant demographic and professional background information was collected from participants. RESULTS: Response was 17% of those who were sent the invitational email and 33% of those who opened it. The rankings suggest that selective reporting, selective citing, and flaws in quality assurance and mentoring are viewed as the major problems of modern research. The “deadly sins” of fabrication and falsification ranked highest on the impact on truth but low to moderate on aggregate level impact on truth, due to their low estimated frequency. Plagiarism is thought to be common but to have little impact on truth although it ranked high on aggregate level impact on trust. CONCLUSIONS: We designed a comprehensive list of 60 major and minor research misbehaviors. Our respondents were much more concerned over sloppy science than about scientific fraud (FFP). In the fostering of responsible conduct of research, we recommend to develop interventions that actively discourage the high ranking misbehaviors from our study. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s41073-016-0024-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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spelling pubmed-58036292018-02-15 Ranking major and minor research misbehaviors: results from a survey among participants of four World Conferences on Research Integrity Bouter, Lex M. Tijdink, Joeri Axelsen, Nils Martinson, Brian C. ter Riet, Gerben Res Integr Peer Rev Research BACKGROUND: Codes of conduct mainly focus on research misconduct that takes the form of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. However, at the aggregate level, lesser forms of research misbehavior may be more important due to their much higher prevalence. Little is known about what the most frequent research misbehaviors are and what their impact is if they occur. METHODS: A survey was conducted among 1353 attendees of international research integrity conferences. They were asked to score 60 research misbehaviors according to their views on and perceptions of the frequency of occurrence, preventability, impact on truth (validity), and impact on trust between scientists on 5-point scales. We expressed the aggregate level impact as the product of frequency scores and truth, trust and preventability scores, respectively. We ranked misbehaviors based on mean scores. Additionally, relevant demographic and professional background information was collected from participants. RESULTS: Response was 17% of those who were sent the invitational email and 33% of those who opened it. The rankings suggest that selective reporting, selective citing, and flaws in quality assurance and mentoring are viewed as the major problems of modern research. The “deadly sins” of fabrication and falsification ranked highest on the impact on truth but low to moderate on aggregate level impact on truth, due to their low estimated frequency. Plagiarism is thought to be common but to have little impact on truth although it ranked high on aggregate level impact on trust. CONCLUSIONS: We designed a comprehensive list of 60 major and minor research misbehaviors. Our respondents were much more concerned over sloppy science than about scientific fraud (FFP). In the fostering of responsible conduct of research, we recommend to develop interventions that actively discourage the high ranking misbehaviors from our study. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s41073-016-0024-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. BioMed Central 2016-11-21 /pmc/articles/PMC5803629/ /pubmed/29451551 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s41073-016-0024-5 Text en © The Author(s) 2016 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research
Bouter, Lex M.
Tijdink, Joeri
Axelsen, Nils
Martinson, Brian C.
ter Riet, Gerben
Ranking major and minor research misbehaviors: results from a survey among participants of four World Conferences on Research Integrity
title Ranking major and minor research misbehaviors: results from a survey among participants of four World Conferences on Research Integrity
title_full Ranking major and minor research misbehaviors: results from a survey among participants of four World Conferences on Research Integrity
title_fullStr Ranking major and minor research misbehaviors: results from a survey among participants of four World Conferences on Research Integrity
title_full_unstemmed Ranking major and minor research misbehaviors: results from a survey among participants of four World Conferences on Research Integrity
title_short Ranking major and minor research misbehaviors: results from a survey among participants of four World Conferences on Research Integrity
title_sort ranking major and minor research misbehaviors: results from a survey among participants of four world conferences on research integrity
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5803629/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29451551
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s41073-016-0024-5
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