RESEARCH ETHICS: Record Keeping and Integrity - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

RESEARCH ETHICS: Record Keeping and Integrity

Matthew Ronning

Associate Vice Chancellor

Research Administration

• Regulatory Compliance
• Human Subjects
• Animal Subjects
• Conflicts of Interest
• Export Controls
• Scientific Misconduct
• And waterskiing to boot!

• Fabrication
• Falsification
• Plagiarism
• Other non-scholarly behaviors
• Fiduciary
• Egocentricity
• I suppose I’m guilty!

• Lack of documentation
• Lack of communication
• Lack of caring
• Pressure to finish
• Leadership is missing
• It starts in 2nd grade

http://www.ncsu.edu/sparcs/lab_management

Source: 2003 Office of Inspector General – National Science Foundation

• Laboratory Notebooks
• Challenges in the digital age
• Fraud more prevalent with digital records
• Forensics are available but not infallible
• DO IT!

Naming conventions

Back ups - tracked

Log / diary

Keep the failures

What’s more important, validation or invalidation when testing a hypothesis?

Arguably, invalidation is more important

Repeating mistakes is stupid

Failure to document what has been tried and failed is a tragedy to the body of knowledge.

• Record – Keep it clean and be religious about it
• Review –Remind yourself what you did the last few days.
• Instruct – Document instructions given and received. Share docs.
• Counsel – Let your subordinates and others know how to behave.
• Think! – Stop for a moment and think about where you’ve been and

where you are headed

• Double Check – Lit search is not a one-stop shopping spree
• Heal – Shore up adversarial relationships

• WWho thought of it first? – Plagiarism resulting from a case of “I don’t like you”
• CChange the numbers, then run the program. – Instructions for an NIH grant application or for an educational exercise?
• XXX – 18 and older only