What is this about? (Is About)
From The Embassy of Good Science
A short summary providing some details about the theme/resource (max. 75 words)
- ⧼SA Foundation Data Type⧽: Text
C
A researcher informally acquires knowledge of unpublished research results that support her theory.
She is invited to conference at an institution where she hopes to work. Is she allowed to share the research results which are not her own? +
This study addresses the need to disclose potential conflict of interest regarding physician-industry relations in preclinical education. Authors consider that introducing the concept of disclosure to the first and second year medical students would improve transparency and lead to benefits in their training. +
Conflict of interests pertain to situations that involve a person or organization with multiple interests (personal, professional, financial…). Working towards one interest could involve conflict with others. Conflicts can be (1) financial or (2) non-financial.
1) Treating patients and working for a pharmaceutical company (or owning their shares) that produces medicine for the same group of patients is an example of financial conflict of interests. Be prescribing and promoting medicine that is produced by this pharmaceutical company, the treating doctor may receive some sort of direct financial comission or have the value of their shares increased.
2) Non-publication of negative results and zero relations and making biased hypotheses are among examples of non-financial conflict of interests.'"`UNIQ--ref-0000029F-QINU`"' Researchers who hide their negative results (to make their data clean or their results more noteworthy), or hypothesise in a manner to yield their prefered results could be seen as examples of non-financial conflict of interests.
It is important to note that conflict of interest includes the potential for conflict as well, and these should always be reported.
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The Spanish Superior Research Council (CSIC), in addition to their general good conduct guidelines, have also made specific guidelines to deal with conflicts of interest. This document aims to increase awareness among researchers regarding actual and potential conflicts of interest, as well as to equip researchers and research institutions to address these conflicts. +
This is a factual case. +
Citizen science, according to the [https://www.ecsa.ngo/ European Citizen Science Association (ESCA)], is "an ‘umbrella’ term that describes a variety of ways in which the public participates in science. The main characteristics are that: (1) citizens are actively involved in research, in partnership or collaboration with scientists or professionals; and (2) there is a genuine outcome, such as new scientific knowledge, conservation action or policy change." +
This fictional case is about an infectious disease researcher who is conducting a survey with men who are HIV positive and sexually active with partners of both sexes. This research contains sensitive information and the community leaders of the research population are not pleased with its results. +
This research paper'"`UNIQ--ref-0000000E-QINU`"' presents two hypothetical scenarios on how citizen's science can be prone to accusations of research integrity violations.
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This is a website intended to be a learning tutorial regarding ethics and the use of animals in research. It consists of an essay with numerous links to other websites. +
Contentious problems in bioscience and biotechnology: a pilot study of an approach to ethics education +
This study presents problem-based learning approach in analyzing "fractious problems" in bioscience and biotechnology. US students from science, engineering, social sciences, humanities and medicine analyzed these problems and presented their results to policy-makers, stakeholders, experts and public. The study concluded that this approach could help in educating future bioscientists and bioengineers. +
J.D. Brighton conducted a research about the perception of police behaviour in a small community. The local police chief requested access to the data in order to have the results confirmed by another researcher. Brighton is worried that sharing data would violate the trust of his participants and make it impossible to continue the research done with them. Moreover, he is worried that some of the participants could be identified by the police. The case study asks whether Brighton should grant access to data. +
Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with regard to the Application of Biology and Medicine. An international tool to protect human dignity from abusive medical and biomedical innovations/technologies. The Convention is also known as the Oviedo Convention. +
Copy and paste: A slow university investigation into serious accusations of misconduct benefits no one +
This ''Nature'' article describes the case of a complaint about plagiarism, made by Bradley against George Mason University’s researchers. The article does not provide an answer as to whether the plagiarism claims are substantiated; instead, it focuses on the unnecessary long delays in the University’s internal investigations in dealing with the allegations. The delays appear to breach the university’s own timelines on misconduct investigations.
The article provides also an exploration of how such delays might have further adverse consequences; for example, they may provide possible loopholes in policy debating, or conversely, accumulate strain on those unfairly accused of wrong-doing. +
This factual case details a court's decision to uphold the prison sentence for a former researcher who was found guilty of scientific misconduct. The misconduct entailed the modification of HIV trial outcomes to make a drug look more effective. The attorney of the defendant appealed the decision, but the court decided to uphold the sentence. +
This text contains guidelines for journalists on how to report about science. For example, journalists should always put research in context, write about the whole research process and be careful when citing risk statistics. +
A student, a post-doc and a professor are working on a problem. They achieve good results in their research. When the student is finishing his master thesis, he discovers that the professor and his post-docs have published a paper on the experiment, that he designed an important part of. He is not given any credit in the paper. +
This blog presents the case of a criminology professor whose several publications were retracted or corrected. The retractions were initially requested by one of his co-authors. +
This case concerns the 2013 book publication of ‘’the Tyranny of the Weak’, published by a professor on the history of North Korea. In the book the author presents his historical research on how North Korea ‘survived’ the Cold War.
In 2014 another historian noticed several irregularities in the sources of the work of the professor and started investigating these irregularities. Many of these sources referred to archives, and were written in Russian, German, Chinese or Korean. The other historian decided to visit one of the archives in person to check the original sources. He states “[I checked] the collection there to reconstruct the original archival locations (…). This way it could be fully verified that the vast majority of the Russian archival citations from 1957-60 were invalid, because the cited files could not be found either in the Seoul collection or in the (essentially identical) Wilson Center collection.”
Upon this discovery, he also reached out to an archive in Berlin, where most sources could also not be located, or contained different information as suggested in the book. In addition, as the historian points out on Retractionwatch, several uncanny similarities appear to exist between "Tyranny of the Weak" and his own book on a similar topic.
The pofessor and book author, replied stating that “[t]he book was reviewed by two expert external reviewers before publication. In addition, before the book was published three years ago I shared the entire manuscript with one of the scholars who is currently critical of the book and is a renowned expert on the Russian sources on North Korea. At that time, this scholar did not find any problem with my use of sources, although he made a number of other comments which I incorporated in the final version of the book.” In 2015 the book earned 52 corrections in the new publication. +
Pavo Barišić says he won't step down after a parliamentary ethics committee found he copied another scholar's work. In a plagiarism scandal in Croatia, the country’s highest-level research ethics committee is clashing with its science minister — who says he won't step down after the committee found he had copied another scholar’s work. Scientists say the case raises questions about academic integrity at the top of a research system that is already riven with misconduct allegations. +
This fictional case is about the communication between a head of a lab, a research manager and a researcher. The researcher has a different cultural background, and interprets the communication differently. +
