Scholarship and Research Integrity (SARI) program here at Penn State is an initiative for enriching and expanding education and support for issues facing graduate researchers in every field.
"Penn State is committed to modeling, teaching and promoting responsible conduct of research and scholarship within the University community. All scholars, from graduate students to senior investigators, confront ethical issues in their professions. The issues that require attention are constantly changing. While advances in technology and the ability to interact with colleagues across the globe have opened up vast opportunities for advancement, they have also created new challenges for the responsible conduct of research and scholarship.
Advance discussion of core principles and possible scenarios can help inform choices frequently made under pressure, helping to eliminate poor decisions. Penn State recognizes that we have a unique opportunity —and a responsibility—to address these issues in a proactive and deliberate manner."
The core principles of research integrity concern the avoidance of research fraud. Research fraud can be perpetrated in at least three main ways, namely through the falsification of the research record, the fabrication of data in the research record, and/or plagiarism (the representation of other(s) work without reference as your own). All three of these infractions of research integrity can have damaging results to individuals, even leading to wrongful death in some cases. Further, such situations can corrode overall public trust of scientific research itself, including research institutions.
A familiar scene of falsification of evidence can found while watching a courtroom television drama, where a law enforcement officer is portrayed as having tainted key evidence during the process of investigation and the suspect on trial is let go, even if the suspect may be guilty. Why does this happen? Why should someone, possibly a criminal, be let go because a piece of evidence was falsified, even if the rest of the evidence was not changed? The reasoning is that any conclusions based on or influenced by the falsified evidence cannot be sustained. Further, falsified evidence brings the validity of all of the other evidence in the case into question as well.
A article from the news illustrates the point: "In her order, [the Judge] -- a former prosecutor -- issued a scathing indictment of the prosecutor in that case for hiding evidence that [the murdered] was allegedly, a sexual predator who had molested [the murderer] and other children. [The Judge] said "evidence has plainly been suppressed," and accused former assistant D.A. of engaging in "gamesmanship" and "playing fast and loose." The judge also said [the prosecutor] "had no problem disregarding her ethical obligations" in an attempt to win."
Another way evidence can be falsified is if it is withheld, particularly if it demonstrates a counter argument, such as DNA evidence demonstrating the innocence of a suspect. If this data is available, but withheld, then it is also a form of falsification or misrepresentation of the available data. There are many similar analogies about falsification in law that also carry over to issues about falsification of data in science, engineering, economics, etc. While what ultimately constitutes proof and certainty in a court of law ("beyond the shadow of a doubt") is not the same that constitutes proof or certainty in science (>95%), the impacts and problems of falsification are very similar.
Falsification in sciences and engineering arise from manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes, or changing or omitting data or results such that research observations are not accurately represented in the research record. Falsification often occurs when a researcher chooses to omit data that goes against confirming a hypothesis, such as omitting to report harmful, but rarely observed, side-effects in Phase 1 or 3 trials of testing a new medication. In this context, falsification of data can lead directly to harming individuals who later take the medication.
Other forms of falsification not of the research ethics kind: There are times when data may be false for reasons of instrumental calibration, such as the recent example of the particles that were thought to be traveling faster than the speed of light, when later it turned out to be instrumental calibration issues. This particular issue does not constitute falsification.There is another notion of falsification in the sciences that should not be confused with the falsification of research data, namely, the falsification of a hypothesis. This simply means that a scientific hypothesis has been demonstrated to be logically false based on existing data.
There is an Aesop's Fable you may be familiar with, titled The Boy Who Cried Wolf, about a shepherd boy who shouts out to the local villagers that a wolf was attacking his flock, but when the villagers rushed to the scene, there was no wolf to be found. The boy did this multiple times, and each time, there was no wolf to be found. When a wolf actually did come to attack the boy's flock, the villagers had ignored the cries, thinking that it was a false alarm, and the boy's flock was destroyed by the wolf. The moral of this story is, at its root, about how being caught fabricating observations, in this case about a wolf, will inevitably lead to an erosion of trust in other claims.
Fabrication is making up data or results and recording them in the research record. Fabrication in research typically concerns the construction of data to fit or conform to a given test or confirm a particular hypothesis. Fabrication is no small issue in the sciences, and publishing work or releasing medicines based on fabricated results can bring big rewards. There exist numerous examples of fabrication in science, medicine, and engineering, many of which likely go undetected.
"Biomedical research has become a winner-take-all game — one with perverse incentives that entice scientists to cut corners and, in some instances, falsify data or commit other acts of misconduct," says senior author Arturo Casadevall of Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
The study reviewed 2,047 papers retracted from the biomedical literature through May 2012 and consulted the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Research Integrity and Retractionwatch.com to establish the cause.
And the team found that about 21 percent of the retractions were attributable to error, while 67 percent were due to misconduct, including fraud or suspected fraud (43 percent), duplicate publication (14 percent), and plagiarism (10 percent). Miscellaneous or unknown reasons accounted for the remaining 12 percent.
"What's troubling is that the more skillful the fraud, the less likely that it will be discovered, so there likely are more fraudulent papers out there that haven't yet been detected and retracted," says Casadevall.
Perhaps you are working on writing a paper for a class and are on a serious deadline, plus you have to study for two midterms, and you have caught a cold, so are not feeling your best. While working on the paper, you decide you can save time writing by cutting and pasting large parts of supporting text from a rather obscure website (it was, after all, three pages into a web search.) You reason that the passages you cut-and-paste are quite appropriate to what you are trying to convey, and that it would be rather difficult to improve on what the author already wrote. Being rushed for time, you also "forget to quote" and/or properly cite the material you pasted into the paper. Upon grading the paper, the instructor catches your shortcut and has a meeting with you about this problem. You are informed by the instructor that this kind of shortcutting is called plagiarism and that you are going to receive an F for the course and a mark on your school record. You realize that this is rather problematic, and could even impact your ability to receive student loans. Then, you think that this seems rather harsh for such a minor infraction. Equally, you wonder, why would the penalty for copying answers on a test be met with equally harsh consequences? (Do some pullout work here on ethics spotting. Why do you think that there are ethical issues with copying work? Does it cause harm?)