Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13815
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Publication type: Journal Article
Titus SL, Wells JA, Rhoades LJ.
Repairing research integrity
Nature 2008 Jun 19; 453:980-982
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7198/full/453980a.html
Abstract:
A survey suggests that many research misconduct incidents in the United States go unreported to the Office of Research Integrity. Sandra L. Titus, James A. Wells and Lawrence J. Rhoades say it’s time to change that.
Misconduct jeopardizes the good name of any institution. Inevitably, the way in which research misconduct is policed and corrected reflects the integrity of the whole enterprise of science. The US National Academy of Sciences has asserted that scientists share an ‘obligation to act’ when suspected research misconduct is observed1. But it has been unclear how well scientists are meeting that obligation. In the United States, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) evaluates all the investigation records submitted by institutions and plays an oversight role in determining whether there has been misconduct at institutions that receive support from the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). The reported number of investigations submitted to ORI has remained low: on average 24 institutional investigation reports per year2.
ORI focuses resources, not only on evaluating institutional reports of research misconduct but also on preventing misconduct and promoting research integrity through deterrence and education. To evaluate these initiatives, we investigated whether the low number of misconduct cases reported to ORI is an accurate reflection of misconduct incidence, or the tip of a much larger iceberg. The latter seems to be the case.
The 2,212 researchers we surveyed observed 201 instances of likely misconduct over a three-year period. That’s 3 incidents per 100 researchers per year. A conservative extrapolation from our findings to all DHHS-funded researchers predicts that more than 2,300 observations of potential misconduct are made every year. Not all are being reported to universities and few of these are being reported to the ORI…
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