INTELLECTUAL HONESTY
➢ Intellectual honesty is honesty in the acquisition, analysis, and transmission of ideas. A person is being intellectually honest when he or she, knowing the truth, states that truth.
➢ This includes all forms of scholarship, consequential conversations such as dialogue, debate, negotiations, product and service descriptions, various forms of persuasion, and public communications such as announcements, speeches, lectures, instruction, presentations, publications, declarations, briefings, news releases, policy statements, reports, religious instructions, social media posts, and journalism including not only prose and speech, but graphs, photographs, and other means of expression
INTELLECTUAL HONESTY
➢ Intellectual honesty is honesty in the acquisition, analysis, and transmission of ideas. A person is being intellectually honest when he or she, knowing the truth, states that truth.
➢ This includes all forms of scholarship, consequential conversations such as dialogue, debate, negotiations, product and service descriptions, various forms of persuasion, and public communications such as announcements, speeches, lectures, instruction, presentations, publications, declarations, briefings, news releases, policy statements, reports, religious instructions, social media posts, and journalism including not only prose and speech, but graphs, photographs, and other means of expression
Intellectual honesty is an applied method of problem solving, characterized by an unbiased, honest attitude, which can be demonstrated in a number of different ways including:
Ensuring support for chosen ideologies does not interfere with the pursuit of truth;
Relevant facts and information are not purposefully omitted even when such things may contradict one's hypothesis;
Facts are presented in an unbiased manner, and not twisted to give misleading impressions or to support one view over another;
References, or earlier work, are acknowledged where possible, and plagiarism is avoided
Conducting Research Good documentation in the form of laboratory notes, research journals, or field notes is valuable for keeping track of one's research progress. This record of the processes and procedures, including information on data sources, their quality, storage, and retrieval is not only necessary to document proper research practice but also to address questions should concerns be expressed about potential misconduct or veracity of results. It is the researchers' responsibility to avoid plagiarism, falsification, fabrication, or misrepresentation, and to report such misdemeanours if they are observed or suspected.
Recommendations for institutions to consider for successfully enhancing a culture of research integrity. In particular, institutions can:
Create an ORI as the organizational entity responsible for the implementation of these guidelines at each institution.
Develop materials for training on research integrity, ethical behaviour, and good research practices. This training will provide the substantive knowledge, skills, and competencies for a researcher with regard to research integrity and ethics.
The core content of the such training should be mandatory with additional training materials reflecting the local context being designed simultaneously and delivered at the discretion of each ORI.
The Office of Research Integrity, ORI, must promote the following values in the conduct and management of research:
Good research practice begins with problem selection and research design. The proposed research should address questions, the answers to which will contribute new knowledge, solve challenges, correct errors in the existing literature, or develop new methods for conducting such research. A good research design involves having a well-documented plan outlining the objectives, roles, and responsibilities. Research builds upon the work of others, who must be Good. Research Practice properly identified, and their contributions appropriately acknowledged. A good literature review helps do that. It locates the proposed research in the broader research landscape, provides insights into identifying data sources and research methods, and lays out a rigorous and systematic approach to analysing and synthesizing the evidence to support the research claims.
Framework for Good Academic Research Practices
To operationalize the above values, a multi-part framework is built around the research cycle, to guide researchers and institutions in achieving research integrity and ethical behaviour. The purpose of this framework is to encourage discussion and debate about ethical research practice and not merely to provide a set of rules that must be adhered to without reflection. This framework is meant to be the beginning of a living document that must be interpreted and applied within the specific context of each research institution.
The framework focuses on three stages of the research life cycle:
1. Research Design
2. Conduct of Research
3. Research Dissemination
Checklist for planning research
A good research question should be:
Research Questions and Documentation
A literature review involves searching and compiling the literature available on a specific topic. A meaningful literature review, however, is much more than a collection of summaries of papers or an annotated bibliography of research manuscripts.
The essential steps in a literature review involve:
Checklist for information for scientific literature review:
Citation analysis is a powerful approach for selecting articles for literature reviews.
In describing the current research landscape, the literature review serves a dual purpose:
Once the research questions have been clarified, contextualized, and located within the existing literature, evidence must be obtained to support or refute the research claims. Typically, this evidence is presented through data.
Once the research question has been defined, the researcher should prepare a research design, which serves as the foundation and scope of the research project.
Preparing the research design usually involves accounting for availability of resources, skills and time. Choosing the appropriate research methods is a crucial decision. The methods vary depending upon the type of research questions, the sources and nature of the data and the purpose of the research (Outhwaite and Turner, 2007).
Primary data sources are where the researcher collects the data for the purposes of the research; Primary data are often obtained from experiments, surveys, focus groups, interviews, case studies, and other sources. Field research often involves detailed observation, document review and analyses of natural phenomena, human artifacts, and objects as well as behaviours and action. The chosen research method needs to be further detailed out. Researchers must also define the target population to collect data from and the sampling strategy to be employed for choosing a sample from the target population (Bhattacherjee, 2012).
Secondary data are those that already exist and could contain information that might shed light on the research questions.
Social science research tends to leverage theory building wherein a researcher observes events, establishes the relationships between events and associated factors influencing the events, locates the common factor, verifies the explanation in various contexts to generalize the explanation and finally, confirms the explanation as a theory. Theory building is perhaps the most difficult aspect of social science research because of the complexity of human systems in terms of the dynamic interdependencies and interactions among the underlying causes and effects. The role of feedback and emergence in these systems makes it difficult to develop theories that are generalizable across time and space (Burrell and Morgan, 2017).
Following appropriate data analytic procedures ensures confidence in the results and the ability of other researchers to replicate and reproduce the results. It is important to keep the following questions in mind:
Careful collection of data is necessary not only for ensuring the quality of the results but also for maintaining records of collection methodology. These records are essential for judging data quality and for ensuring that future researchers can replicate the results.
Research Execution, Documentation, and Data Storage
Checklist for data collection
Research data and related files need to be stored securely during all phases of the research process.
According to the US Office of Science and Technology Policy, “Research misconduct is defined as fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results” (Federal Research Misconduct Policy, 2000). The terms fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism are defined as: “Fabrication: Making up data or results. Falsification: 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.
Plagiarism: The appropriation of another person's ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit (The Office of Research Integrity, 2020a). Research misconduct does not include inadvertent errors or differences of opinion; however, generally accepted standards play a major role in describing significant departures from accepted practices. “Knowingly, intentionally, or recklessly” departing from standard practice can be grounds for allegations of misconduct”.
There are several ways in which researchers knowingly, intentionally, or recklessly misrepresent their data and findings. Given the variety of ways in which research can be misrepresented and the creativity of researchers in doing so, detecting such misconduct is not easy. Research misconduct and bias has become a focus of academic research (Ioannides, 2020) and a subject of study by government agencies (The Office of Research Integrity, 2020a) and private organizations (UK Research Integrity Office, 2020). Data manipulation and image tampering, such as relabelling axes, distorting a visual representation of data, or using the same image to suggest that it represents results from multiple experiments are just a few
Checks for Plagiarism, Falsification, Fabrication, and Misrepresentation
examples of the ‘creative’ ways in which researchers have misrepresented their research (The Office of Research Integrity, 2020b: Case Summary—Yakkanti Sudhakar).
These problems have become more common with the ready access to software, which allows researchers to manipulate pictures of slides and biological specimens in minor ways to imply changes over time or represent multiple observations when in fact they are simply variations of the original picture (Cromey, 2010).
Study by Fanelli et al. (2017)
Plagiarism is the most common form of scientific misconduct (Martin, 2013). Plagiarism in research entails a researcher using other’s material in such a way that it presents a misleading picture of being the researcher’s own contribution. Thus, plagiarism can concern various aspects of research and its contents. Chaddah (2014) has discussed three types of plagiarism:
The use of automated textual analysis makes detecting plagiarism in the form of copying text relatively easy, but it is more difficult to assess when ideas or results have been appropriated inappropriately. Research often builds past results, ideas, and methods. Because the reward system of science depends on intellectual property claims, it is crucial that researchers assiduously attribute credit for the work of others. To do otherwise violates conventional research norms and constitutes a moral failure (Merton, 1973).
The ORI of the US Department of Health and Human Services recommends that “before any work on a collaboration is undertaken, there should be some common understanding of:
It is common for a researcher to refer to his or her earlier research. Again, when citing one’s own work, it is usually best to treat it in the same way as if one was citing another scholar’s work. Neglecting to take such precautions is called self-plagiarism.
Attribution of credit and authorship of the research report and subsequent research publications and presentations.
There are several prevalent practices for deciding authorships (National Academy of Sciences et al., 1995)— including, but not limited to, authors' names being listed in order of their contributions with authors that have higher contributions being listed first; in order of author's seniority/influence; in alphabetical order, and so on. In some institutions it is customary to include the supervisor's name upfront whereas in some institutions it is either appended at the end of the authors' list or not included at all. As a best practice for authorship, it is encouraged to give priority to the authors in order of their contributions irrespective of seniority. However, there is also the question of a corresponding author. Given that this role involves active correspondence with the journal or reviewers and other researchers, assigning it to a senior researcher may be more appropriate.
Research in computer science, engineering, and the life sciences, among other fields, often yields intellectual property of significant commercial value, which can be protected by patents, trademarks, copyrights, and other forms of guarantees. The proper assignment of intellectual property and preservation of these rights takes on additional importance because of the associated economic value. Assigning intellectual property rights, to the extent possible, to the stakeholders at the start of the project is good research practice. Clarifying these aspects of the research outputs at the outset decreases the likelihood of problems and conflicts arising at later stages of the project.
An important aspect of research is its dissemination. The primary purpose of dissemination is to inform the larger community of the findings of the research activity so that it becomes a part of the scientific knowledgebase for other scientists to replicate, test, challenge, confirm, and build upon. Often, research findings are of interest to others, such as practitioners, policy- and decisionmakers, and the public. Seeking proper outlets and providing the information at an audience-appropriate level of comprehensibility and format become important criteria to ensure that the research reaches the appropriate audience in the correct format at the right time. Peer-reviewed journals are among the key channels for research dissemination.
In a “publish-or-perish” world, publication can become an objective in its own right, encouraging a market for predatory journals and introducing unethical publication practices. The editorial policies of publishers of reputable journals are the first line of defence in ensuring research quality and integrity.
The recent increase in academic journals with little or no editorial standards to ensure research quality is becoming one of the more flagrant examples of academic misconduct, apart from the commercial exploitation of the research community. A 'consensus' definition of a predatory journal is, “Predatory journals and publishers are entities that prioritize self-interest at the expense of scholarship and are characterized by false or misleading information, deviation from best editorial and publication practices, a lack of transparency, and/or the use of aggressive and indiscriminate solicitation practices” (Grudniewicz et al., 2019).
UGC guidance document “Public Notice on Academic Integrity,” draws specific attention to predatory journals (UGC, 2019). Some of the typical characteristics of predatory journals are:
Submitting a manuscript to an unsuitable journal is one of the most common mistakes that authors make and one of the major reasons for the rejection of a manuscript. First-time authors or those who are branching out into diverse research areas may be unfamiliar with the journals in the field. On the other hand, seasoned authors, too, tend to publish in the same journals, although new publication opportunities are constantly arising in the form of online- and open access (OA) publications.
An important aspect of research is its dissemination. The primary purpose of dissemination is to inform the larger community of the findings of the research activity so that it becomes a part of the scientific knowledgebase for other scientists to replicate, test, challenge, confirm, and build upon. Often, research findings are of interest to others, such as practitioners, policy- and decisionmakers, and the public. Seeking proper outlets and providing the information at an audience-appropriate level of comprehensibility and format become important criteria to ensure that the research reaches the appropriate audience in the correct format at the right time. Peer-reviewed journals are among the key channels for research dissemination.
In a “publish-or-perish” world, publication can become an objective in its own right, encouraging a market for predatory journals and introducing unethical publication practices. The editorial policies of publishers of reputable journals are the first line of defence in ensuring research quality and integrity.
Scholarly journals are diverse in terms of their content and audience. Their variety can come from several sources, for example, journals vary by their level of specialization, disciplinary focus, and relative emphasis on contributions to theory versus applications of theory. In the natural and physical sciences, a distinction is made between a focus on theory versus experiments; in the social sciences a distinction is often made in whether the target audience is academia or practitioners or some combination. It is up to the author to decide on the outlet that best meets the current scholarly requirements.
Has the journal published articles of similar nature? After short listing journals based on their broad aims and scope, authors should consider a more in-depth search within the journal with keywords from their manuscript to determine whether the journal has published similar work. An indicator of where a manuscript might be submitted is to be found among its own cited references. Journals that are most frequently cited might be good outlets for the work.
What are the journal’s submission requirements?
Details of a niche research topic are more likely to be accepted for publication in specialized journals. On the other hand, OA journals might be accessed by wider audience, leading to increased discoverability since there are no subscription fees associated with accessing them. Recently, several OA journals have been on the receiving end of increasing criticism over the lack of proper peer review and poor-quality control. A quick check to assess journal quality might be to determine whether a journal is indexed in reputed citation databases. Although, potentially subject to manipulation, the presence of respected scholars on the journal’s editorial board is another indicator of journal quality.
What is the journal’s impact factor and rank?
The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the ratio of the number of citations to the journal’s articles to the number of total citable articles published in that journal over a fixed period of time.
One should also look at the relative standing of a journal in a given subject category based on JIF. The JIF is a journal-level indicator that is one of the many criteria that can be used to determine aspects of journal quality.
What is the journal’s peer review process?
Peer review process should be independent, rigorous, and unbiased. Authors should assess whether the journal provides: timely and comprehensive review of the manuscript; constructive and valuable comments that enhance quality; information on the number of reviewers involved; an understanding of how closely the editor is involved in the process.
Are there red flags in journal issues?
Diversity of authorship is often a good indicator of journal quality. For instance, the dominance of a small set of authors, or institutions in the journal is a potential red flag. Similarly, an implied promise of publication before submission, immediate acceptance of the articles upon submission or a lack of proper peer review could suggest lack of due diligence and/or improper publication practice. The ORI can develop special training focused on the topic of research publication and dissemination for young scholars and students. Grey, et al. (2020) provide a checklist to promote publication integrity to pre-empt misconduct.
“The committee on publication ethics (COPE) advises publishers to retract articles when there is ‘clear evidence that the findings are unreliable,’ but does not advise on how to determine whether that is the case. Their ‘REAPPRAISED’ checklist consists of the following items: research governance, ethics, authorship, productivity, plagiarism, research conduct, analysis and methods, image manipulation, statistics and data, errors and data duplication and reporting. The use of this checklist, can help to speedup the identification and correction of flawed papers, preventing wasted resources ....” all the items in this checklist are not relevant for a researcher who is seeking to publish or attempting to assess the quality of a journal. However, itis a comprehensive list and a good place to start. Vigilance to ensure that such practices are not rewarded has to be an important aspect of research integrity and ethical practice.
Some of the common factors for rejecting a manuscript include (Ali, 2010):
Manuscript content does not conform to scope of the journal or the overarching theme of a special issue or is not interesting to the target audience
Journals rely on the peer review process to ensure quality and identify plagiarism or other forms of misconduct. Unfortunately, identifying research misconduct is difficult, especially when the authors and reviewers belong to a small community where it is to everyone’s mutual benefit to increase the number of publications and citations to those publications. This problem is further compounded when journal publishers and editors also have an interest in increasing the number of citations to articles published in their journals, which result in subtle and not so subtle efforts at encouraging authors to cite specific articles or journals (WilhiteandFong,2012).
As stated by Horkoff (2015), the following basic practices should be observed:
The number of citations a journal receives in a given year, taken against the total citable items it published over the preceding two year period, determines its Journal Impact Factor (JIF). The JIF provides an important and objective measure of a journal’s contribution to scholarly communication.
ORI has an important role to play in educating and training researchers at all stages of their career. Education and training can be built upon guidance from COPE, the REAPPRAISED checklist, and the Johnson Report on scholarly and scientific publishing (Johnson, et al., 2018), among others.
Scientific knowledge has the power to enhance the quality of life and impart positive societal impact to the beneficiaries (Pope and Brandt, 1997). “Technology transfer is the transmittal of developed ideas, products, or techniques.
Translation of Research from a research environment to one of practical application, and thus is an important component of the research life cycle.” (Pope and Brandt, 1997).
Focusing on practical problems as a source of research ideas and seeking applications of research that can be quickly brought to the marketplace are efficient approaches to technology transfer.
Some good practices to be followed in ensuring efficient transfer of academic research findings to real-life application are:
With respect to institutional support, the ORI can:
An important part of research integrity is ensuring ownership, recognition, and acknowledgement of intellectual property. Additional consideration has to be given to financial conflicts of interest when dealing with applications of research, especially when the research is the product of collaboration. Explicit and proper documentation of all the rights, responsibilities, and expectations regarding intellectual property at the start of the research project is extremely important, especially when there is potential for financial gain.
In brief, maintaining the highest standards of research integrity, regardless of the nature of the research, is always a good practice both in the short and long-run. Finally, although most academic research does not immediately or always yield direct commercial value, fundamental science often underpins applied science. Basic research is at times blamed for being disconnected from the real-world problems and is also criticized for absorbing a disproportionate share of government funding.
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