1 Ethics Considerations in Social and Evaluative Research

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Ethics

Considerations in Social and Evaluative Research

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Intent of Research

Discovery and creation of knowledge/theory building (Basic Research)

Testing, confirmation, revision, refutation of knowledge or theory (Applied Research)

Public policy input (e.g., information policy) (Public Policy Research)

Investigation of a problem for local decision making or planning (Action Research)

Evaluation Research

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Trends

Co-authored works: individual vs. teams Funding Mentoring

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Ethics in Conducting Research

Issues and Concerns

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Ethical Issues/ Areas of Concern

Dishonesty with participants Lying about, or hiding, the actual purpose of the

research Passive deception Unobtrusive observation

– Why might we do it?– What are some results– Milgram experiment, Tuskegee experiment, Tea Room

Trade, etc.

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Anthropology

Some anthropologists may have conducted questionable experiments on Amazon tribes. They fomented deadly disease and violence and they observed the consequences--injecting the Yanomami with a controversial vaccine for measles (lack a natural immunity to it); the vaccine causes measles-like symptoms and has proved deadly

They also staged fights among tribal members and encourage violence

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Do Ethical Issues Comprise Misconduct?

Business professor at Columbia University wrote a letter on business school stationery to the owners of about 250 restaurants in NYC, complaining that he had been stricken with food poisoning after dinner at their establishments. He stated that he and his wife went to the restaurant to celebrate a wedding anniversary but ended up in the bathroom, vomiting.

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In fact, he was doing an “experiment” to compare how business owners responded to polite customer complaints versus how they responded to complaints from enraged-sounding customers.

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How about …

…Researchers [in a study conducted in mid-1990s] enticed landlords to recruit 108 families with healthy children to live in row houses with varying degrees of lead contamination to measure the effectiveness of lead-abatement projects in the city’s poor areas. The parents say they didn’t know the row houses had lead paint, and were told too late by the researchers that their children were being put at risk.

Boston Globe (9/3/2001, p. 1)

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Ethical Issues

Informed Consent Institutional Review/ Human Subjects Conflict of Interest for Researchers

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Ethical Considerations in the Collecting and Analyzing Data

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Ethical Concerns

Fabrication of data Fudging Carelessness/ lack of thorough research In 2004, Health and Human Services received 247

complaints of misconduct in research- 50% higher than the year before (MSNBC, charges of fake research reach a new high, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8474936/)

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Deceivers: Some …

Students (high school up): Teachers trying to educate their students (e.g., falsified home pages)

Faculty members Medical researchers Journalists Governments (mislead or

disguise)

How about the private sector:

– Businesses– Corporations

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Students (continued)– Failure to repay intellectual debt in what they use/cite– Inaccurate references

Faculty– Failure to obtain permission for quotations, figures, and

adaptations of figures placed in scholarly articles– Failure to repay intellectual debt and inaccurate references– Place article on home page contrary to journal/ publisher

specifications (publisher agreement)

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Visual Deception—Digital Forgery

When is seeing believing– Digital technology enables manipulation of images:

subversion of the certainty of photographic evidence Workers at plant (six African-American workers became

“mysteriously white and an Indian executive had lost his beard and turban): Newsweek (March 4, 1996), p. 55

Abraham Lincoln and Marilyn Monroe George H. Bush and Margaret Thatcher Photo of fictitious meeting between then President Clinton and

Saddam Hussein

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Examples

“A key study pointing to the effectiveness of high-dose chemotherapy and bone marrow treatments in treating metastatic breast cancer was based on faked data (Arizona Republic, April 27, 2001)

One researcher in Vermont falsified data and made up research on menopause, aging and hormonal supplements over 8 years, and obtained over $500,000 in federal research grant money(MSNBC, 2005).

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Examples

Merck is being accused of inventing an entire journal- the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine- and passing it off as an independent peer-reviewed publication (http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2009/04/merck_accused_of_launching_fak.html)

A highly regarded humanities professor at the University of California at San Diego listed “a bachelor’s degree from Grambling College on his CV.” He claimed to have graduated in 1963. In fact, he had no college diploma (The Chronicle of Higher education, April 4, 2003, P. A10)

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1995 Paper on “Coping with Discrimination”

“has been cited in more than 50 psychology studies, according to the Social Sciences Citation Index. The author fabricated three experiments in the above article and one more.

The fabrications were part of federally-funded research

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Ethical Concerns: Presentation of Findings and Publication

Plagiarism Gratuitous co-authoring Inaccurate referencing Gratuitous co-authorship, premature

publication, duplicate publication

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Northern Kentucky University

Five professors (the entire finance department) accused by the University “of fabricating data in scholarly papers, duplicating large chunks of their own work in several papers, plagiarizing and listing as authors a number of professors at the university who did not contribute.”

“The same sets of data and results were used in multiple papers but were attributed to different studies. … passages [were] duplicated in several papers.”

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Or …

“The editor of American Psychologist … has reneged on an agreement to publish an article critical of the journal’s sponsor and of several members of Congress. … In … [that article, the author] charges the American Psychological Association with caving in to congressional pressure when it apologized for an article about child sexual abuse” [The Chronicle of Higher Education, online, 05/23/2001; 05/28/1999]

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Notice of Retraction

“Of the eight persons names as authors of the article [one that appeared in print], some claimed that they had never reviewed the original data and most claimed that they had not seen or approved either the original version or one or more of the three revised versions of the manuscript One author claimed that he had seen neither the original data nor any version of the manuscript. Thus, there was a egregious disregard of the principles of authorship …

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“During the review process, several of the authors’ signatures were falsified by a coauthor (who later confirmed to us that he had done this)”

Gregory D. Curfman, “Editorial: Notice of Retraction,” The New England Journal of Medicine (March 6, 2003)

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PLEDGE REQUIRED (IN WRITING)

Prior to manuscript review, each author attest to (1) his/her authorship of the paper, (2) the fact that he/she had access to all study data, the freedom to analyze the data as he/she saw fit, and the authority to publish the findings regardless of the implications for companies funding the research

The journal then sends each author an email when the accepted has been accepted.

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A study by Dr. John M. Budd et al. in the Journal of the American Medical Association (July 15, 1998) examined 235 scientific journal articles that had been formally retracted due to error, misconduct, failure to replicate results, or other reasons. The researchers reported that, “Retracted articles continue to be cited as valid works in the biomedical literature after publication of the retraction.”

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Of All the Questions That Remain Unanswered,

the simple one, “How much misconduct is there?,” has inspired the most debate.

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How much?

Hard to estimate- may only be a small fraction of total

H&HS reports 185 cases of misconduct over 15 years.

Science journal Nature claims only 1.5% of over 3,000 researchers admitted to falsification or plagiarism

… But one in three admit to “some type” of professional misbehavior

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Summary of Types of Problems

Lack of honoring of “intellectual debt:” lifting the work of others without attribution. The intentional mis-characterization of works of others

Falsifying data/experiments/ research findings

Falsifying CVs

While reviewing research proposals, turning one down and later submitting the same proposal yourself

Filling out some questionnaires yourself or some of the questions

Gratuitous co-authorship, premature publication, duplicate publication

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Examples of Journals in Which Misconduct Has Appeared

American Journal of Medicine

Cell Clinical Research Journal of the American

Chemical Society The Lancet

New England Journal of Medicine

Science Tumor Research

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Is the Problem That Serious?

There are only a few isolated incidents

Whatever appears in print, is true? (Even in peer reviewed journals)

Science, after all, is self-correcting

Governments never “lie”

How about links between corporate sponsorship and conflicts of interest (e.g., medical research)-- Researchers have a

significant financial stake in companies sponsoring research; researchers are driven by financial motives, including the need for subsequent public or private sector funding

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Ethical Issues

What are the implications of misconduct to library collections

Can we rely on “science as self-correcting” Where is the pressure coming from that

results in “misconduct”

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Causes for Misconduct

David Wright, a Michigan State University professor who has researched why scientists cheat, said there are four basic reasons: some sort of mental disorder; foreign nationals who learned somewhat different scientific standards; inadequate mentoring; and, most commonly, tremendous and increasing professional pressure to publish studies.

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Misconduct Affects the

Findings of research, government and non-government

What we read and hear Scholarship, including the integrity of journals and

fields of study (e.g., publishing fraudulent research to discredit a journal and a field of study)

educational system Policies based on certain research Library budgets Other?

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New Issue

“Thumbing his nose at academe, a scholar tries to auction his services,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 28, 2004)

– An independent scientists auctioned his services as co-author on eBay, with the promise of helping the highest bidder write a scientific paper for publication

– Web site offers $$ for people to write research papers http://www.someuseless.info/130/academia-research-get-paid-to-write-academic-papers/

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How Can We Attack the Problem

Strengthen penalties on those convicted of misconduct Review conflicts of interest guidelines Require signed agreements from all authors; ensure that each one is

sent that agreement and returns it Make more people aware of the issue (as the New England Journal of

Medicine has done) Find ways to increases information literacy of various groups—e.g.,

locate and evaluate information before using it. Do not assume the problem resides only with students Become familiar with the Office of Research Integrity (Department of

Health and Human Services), http://ori.hhs.gov/html/programs/instructresource.asp

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How Can We Attack the Problem

Resume congressional oversight hearings, like done in early 1980s, for the purpose of (1) greater public awareness and (2) accountability for public monies spent

Increase knowledge of the research process, among students in more social and behavioral sciences– Including requiring research methods in LIS

programs

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How Can We Attack the Problem

Continue to support committees that protect human subjects, animals in research, etc.

Pressure universities to deal with the issue and have proper guidelines for addressing the issue. Tendency is to be silent on the issue: image

Correct bibliographic apparatus: need for retraction and correction

Role of human and animal subject committees at colleges and universities

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What We Cannot Do

Interfere with the integrity of the peer- review process

Attack or discourage legitimate whistleblowing Overvalue replication of social science research

(placing such research in peer-reviewed journals) Assume that misconduct applies only to students Assume that misconduct is an insignificant problem

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Elsevier

The ethical problems you may encounter include: • Plagiarism

• Research results not being original to purported author • Allegations about authorship of contributions • Double submission   We have prepared a legal guide for you to help you deal with such issues, which you can find at:

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/editorsinfo.editors/ethicshelpdesk

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Elsevier and PubMed

Effective October 1, 2006, Wellcome Trust grantees are required to submit an electronic copy of the final manuscripts of their research papers into PubMed Central (PMC), or UKPubMed Central (UKPMC) once established. The Wellcome Trust requires that the author’s work be made freely available to the public, via PMC, no later than six months after the official date of final publication (see http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/node3302.html for more details of the Wellcome Trust policy).

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Elsevier and PubMed (continued)

The agreement with the Wellcome Trust allows authors who publish in Elsevier journals to comply with these requirements. This new agreement is intended to support the needs of Elsevier authors, editors, and society publishing partners, and protect the quality and integrity of the peer review process.

Information regarding this agreement is available on Elsevier.com, at

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/

authorshome.authors/wellcometrustauthors

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Copyright Permission

Form to sign Liability

Use of quoted material Poetry, tables/figures Restricted manuscript

collections

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Scholarly communication

www.knowyourcopyrights.org/ www.arl.org/fair/ www.informationaccess.org/

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Finally, authors should think about titles of their publications

Fending Off Attacks on Social Science– http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/05/04/nsf