Trust and Scientific Practice

Trust and Scientific Practice UD Undergraduate Research Program

Trust and Scientific Practice • Importance of Trust in Science • Scientific Misconduct Defined • Fabrication, Falsification, Plagiarism • Conflicts of Interest • Case Studies • Avoiding Plagiarism • Response to Plagiarism • Data Handling UD Undergraduate Research Program

Why is Trust Important to Science? • Reliance on existing information. (You can’t repeat every previous experiment and still make “progress.”) • Collaboration with other investigators. (Open sharing of results with others.) • Reliance of others on your results and conclusions. • Public perception of science, (The public supports science.) UD Undergraduate Research Program

Paradox of Scientific Skepticism and Trust • Scientists are professional skeptics, trusting only observation, experiment, and data for the determination of “truth.” • Scientists must trust the integrity (skepticism?) of other scientists in order to advance knowledge and find new “truth” in their fields. UD Undergraduate Research Program

Federal Policy on Research Misconduct* • Research misconduct is defined as fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results. * US Office of Science and Technology Policy. <www.ostp.gov/html/001207_3.html> UD Undergraduate Research Program

Federal Policy on Research Misconduct • Fabrication is making up data or results and recording or reporting them. • Falsification is manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes, or changing or omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the research record. UD Undergraduate Research Program

Federal Policy on Research Misconduct • Plagiarism is the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit. UD Undergraduate Research Program

Undermining Trust:Conflicts of Interests • A conflict of interest occurs when there is a divergence between an individual's private interests and his or her professional obligations such that professional actions or decisions …might be or might appear to be… influenced by considerations of personal gain, financial or otherwise. UD Undergraduate Research Program

Hidden Drug Payments at Harvard (Editorial, NY Times, 10 June 2008) • “Three prominent psychiatrists at the Harvard Medical School … have been caught vastly underreporting their income from drug companies whose fortunes could be affected by their studies and their promotional efforts on behalf of aggressive drug treatments. … the Harvard group’s research has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic drugs to treat children. …critics complain that the studies (were) too small and loosely designed to provide conclusive results (and) subject to biased interpretation through use of a subjective rating scale.” UD Undergraduate Research Program

Case Study A: Avoiding Plagiarism • Plagiarism is the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit. • How do you give proper credit to another person in a research paper? • Professor Slymebahl asked his class to write an overnight essay about the unintended effects of institutional policies and procedures on academic honesty. Many of his students referred to the Martinson et al. (2005) paper in Nature, but he was troubled by the different ways that students cited this paper. Can you help him decide whether he should dock points from these student papers based on plagiarism or improper citation. UD Undergraduate Research Program

Original Text: “Little attention has so far been paid to the role of the broader research environment in compromising scientific integrity. It is now time for the scientific community to consider what aspects of this environment are most salient to research integrity, which aspects are most amenable to change, and what changes are likely to be the most fruitful in ensuring integrity in science (Martinson, et al., 2005).” From: Martinson, B.C., M.S. Anderson,andR. deVries, 2005. Scientists behaving badly. Nature, 435:737-738 UD Undergraduate Research Program

Why is it so important to cite references in technical and research papers? Who really cares? UD Undergraduate Research Program

Case Study B: Response to Plagiarism • Colleen Hogan, an undergraduate interested in pursuing a graduate degree in Psychology is hired by Professor Simpson, in her college’s Psychology Department, to conduct a literature search for a book that Simpson is writing and to copy edit sections of the book as Simpson completes them. While editing the text, she finds three paragraphs taken verbatim from one of the papers that she had found for Simpson. When she brings this to Simpson’s attention, he tells her to "grow up and understand that this goes on all the time. After all, no one ever gets hurt.“ • She is troubled by this response. What should she do next? UD Undergraduate Research Program

Case Study B: Response to Plagiarism • Is it really true that “this happens all the time”? • Is it really true that “no one ever gets hurt?” • Who can she go to for advice or assistance? • Hogan thinks that she really needs Simpson’s letter of recommendation in order to get into graduate school. What should she do? UD Undergraduate Research Program

Case Study C:Data Analysis and Reporting Deborah, a graduate student, and Kathleen, a post-doctoral fellow, at Well-Known University make a series of difficult measurements at a national laboratory. During the experiment, they noticed some unexplained fluctuations in the measurements, but until they returned to the their home institution, they did not have the opportunity to look closely at their data. Once they do look at their data, they see that 2 of the 8 measurements that they made are not consistent the their hypotheses and the theory that they were testing. Since these two points were measured at the time that they observed the unexplained fluctuations, Kathleen suggests to Deborah that they just drop these measurements from the graph and any statistical analysis and just say that they did not use the 2 anomalous points due to “machine problems.” Deborah is concerned that this may lead to accusations of data falsification. UD Undergraduate Research Program

Case Study C:Deborah’s and Kathleen’s Results Proposed Theory From: On Being a Scientist, 1995. National Academy Press UD Undergraduate Research Program

Case Study C:Data Analysis and Reporting • Should the data be reported and included in all of the statistical tests? If so, why? If not, why not? • Is the removal of suspected data “falsification?” • Who can Deborah and Kathleen go to for advice? • What advice would you give to Deborah and Kathleen? UD Undergraduate Research Program

Where to go for AdviceWho y’gonna call? • Advisor and/or Mentor • Department Chair • Research Integrity Office of Institution • Professional Organizations • Journal Editors • Research Integrity Office of Funding Agency UD Undergraduate Research Program

Questions? UD Undergraduate Research Program

Trust and Scientific Practice