PhD Students’ Awareness of Research Misconduct

Letter to the Editor 163 LETTER TO PHD STUDENTS' AWARENESS OF RESEARCH MISCONDUCT Recent articles in Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics about researcher perceptions of research misconduct inspired me to think about effective ways to improve the teaching of ethics to our PhD students. I recognized that lecturing about research misconduct would be less effective than a class discussion in which students raised issues of research misconduct. The student discussion could then be followed by my presentation of material related to the issues students raised. I have found a method of teaching about research ethics that seems to work well and wanted to share it with JERHRE's readership. To get the discussion started, I devised an informal discussion group of 24 students from the second year of our PhD program. Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology, at our Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Kragujevac, Serbia. There were 8 male and 16 female students; the average age was 29 years. Two discussion group meetings were held. In preparation for the first meeting, I made a list of the 15 most deleterious forms of research misconduct stated in the Singapore Statement on Research Integrity (2010) and the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (2011), and kept it out of sight of the students until the second meeting. Interestingly, all of the 15 forms of misconduct are ones I had encountered at least once during my university career. During the first discussion group meeting, I encouraged the students to freely express their knowledge and opinions about research misconduct and to name, as precisely as possible, all of the kinds of research misconduct they knew about or could imagine. After each student mentioned a form of research misconduct, I helped the student to define it more precisely until their description closely resembled one of the 15 forms of misconduct mentioned in the Singapore Statement on Research Integrity or the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity. At the second meeting, the students were presented with the full list of the 15 research misconduct forms, and necessary explanations were given. During the first meeting, the students identified nine of 15 kinds of research misconduct. Seven of the nine kinds were recognized by all. Students identified as unethical behavior the following: plagiarism. loumal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, V Oí. falsification, fabrication of results, research subject disrespect, biased methodology and research results representation, research sabotage, concealment of conflict of interest, unfair author designation, and author's incompetent public appearance. When compared with the list of 15 major research misconduct forms from the international research misconduct guidelines, the students failed to recognize as research misconduct the following: using unreliable research methodology and avoiding predetermined research procedures, lack of transparency in research, failing to report on a concrete research misconduct incident, deliberate destruction of research records, inappropriate paper review or rejection to undertake the review, and failure to acknowledge potential bad consequences of research on society. Interestingly, all of the students agreed that they had been completely unaware that those six kinds of research behavior were considered research misconduct, although they had already experienced some of them, and could understand why they did indeed constitute misconduct. In summary, more than one third of the kinds of research misconduct identified in the Singapore Statement or European Code of Conduct were not recognized as misconduct by our PhD students, although all of them had formal education on ethics in research in the preceding year. The discussion group members endorsed my proposal to improve students' understanding of research ethics by: (a) further development of the PhD course "Ethics in Research," (b) development of guidelines regarding ethical behavior of researchers, and (c) more intensive engagement of tutors in providing key information about research misconduct to PhD students. The only two previously published studies on awareness of PhD students about research misconduct forms were conducted in Norway (189 students filled out a questionnaire) and Turkey (143 students filled out a questionnaire) (Arda, 2011; Hofmann, Myhr, & Holm, 2013). In both of those studies PhD students were unable to identify the same forms of research misconduct that our students failed to identify, except for willingness to report misconduct to competent authority, which was recognized by the students from Norway. 8, N o . 2 , pp. 1 6 3 - 1 6 4 , P R I N T ISSN 1 5 5 6 - 2 6 4 6 . O N L I N E ISSN 1 5 5 6 - 2 6 5 4 . ©2013 BY lOAN SIEBER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PLEASE DIRECT ALL REQUESTS FOR PERMISSIONS TO PHOTOCOPY OR REPRODUCE ARTICLE CONTENT THROUGH THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS's RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS WEBSITE, HTTP://wwW.UCPRESSIOURNALS.COM/REPRINTINFO.ASP. DOI: 10.1525/jer.2013.8.2.163 164 Letter to the Editor It is apparent that our PhD students need more specific education about the various kinds, extent, and meaning of research misconduct. The same conclusion was drawn from a recent survey of knowledge and attitudes toward ethical principles of science conducted among 361 PhD students from Serbia (VuckovicDekic et al., 2011). The major emphasis on blatant misconduct (fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism) has tended to obscure some more subtle but equally harmful errors or omissions in researchers' assessment of potentially harmftü research behavior. As our discussion group suggested, the best way to increase knowledge about research misconduct is to invest heavily in creating a culture of high research ethics standards within their academic program. The students who participated in this informal study also devised it with me and participated in authoring this letter. MiLOS BosKOVic, JELENA DJOKOVIC, IVA GRUBOR, VLADIMIR G U Z V I C , BOZIDAR JAKOVLJEVIC, MiLENA JURISEVIC, DANIJELA LIUBISIC, MARINA MIJAJLOVIC, IVANA M I L I C E V I C , MiLICA MiLOVANOVIC, LjILJANA NiKOLIC, MiLOS NiKOLic, SASA PERIC, A N A PETROVIC, JELENA PETROVIC, KATARINA RADONJIC, LjUBiCA SiMONOvic, MARKO SIMOVIC, STEFAN STOJANOVIC, ISIDORA STOJIC, JoviCA ToMOvic, SANDRA VRANIC, KsENijA VuciCEVic, ANDJELA ZDRAVKOVIC, AND SLOBODAN JANKOVIC* *Address correspondence to: Slobodan Jankovic, Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Kragujevac, Faculty of Medical Sciences, Svetozara Markovica 69, 34000 Kragujevac, Serbia. E-MAIL: [email protected] References ARDA, B. (2011). Publication ethics from the perspective of PhD students of health sciences: A limited experience. Science and Engineering Ethics, 18(2), 213-222. European Science Foundation. (2011). The European code of conduct for research integrity. Available online at http://www. nsf.gov/od/oise/Code_Conduct_ResearchIntegrity.pdf. HoFMANN, B., MYHR, A., & HoLM, S. (2013). Scientific dishonesty: A nationwide survey of doctoral students in Norway. BMC Medical Ethics, 14(1), 3. Singapore Statement on Research Integrity. (2010). Paper presented at the 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity, July 21-24, 2010, Singapore. Available online at http://www. singaporestatement.org/statement.html. VUCKOVIC-DEKIC, L., GAVRILOVIC, D . , KEZIC, I., BoGDANOVic, G., & BRKIC, S. (2011). Science ethics education, part I: Perception and attitude toward scientific fraud among medical researchers. lournal ofBUQN, 16(4), 771-777. Copyright of Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics is the property of University of California Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. 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