Abstract
The importance of public confidence in scientific findings and trust in scientists cannot be overstated. Thus, it becomes critical for the scientific community to focus on enhancing the strategies used to educate future scientists on ethical research behaviors. What we are lacking is knowledge on how faculty members shape and develop ethical research standards with their students. We are presenting the results of a survey with 3,500 research faculty members. We believe this is the first report on how faculty work with and educate their PhD students on basic research standards. Specifically, we wanted to determine whether individual faculty members, who are advisors or mentors, differ in how they implemented components of responsible conduct of research (RCR) with their PhD students. Mentors were more likely than advisors or supervisors to report working with all of their PhDs, who graduated in the last 5 years, on the 17 recognized critical components of RCR training and research skill development. We also found about half of the faculty members believe RCR is an institutional responsibility versus a faculty responsibility. Less than a quarter have had opportunities to participate in faculty training to be a better mentor, advisor, or research teacher, and about one third of faculty did not or could not remember whether they had guidelines related to their responsibilities to PhD students. We discuss the implications of our findings and focus on ways that PhD research mentoring can be enhanced.
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Notes
Poehlman committed research misconduct for 10 years in many different research areas; he wasted $1 million on fabricated results and 10 papers were retracted. He was sentenced to 1 year and 1 day in jail for research misconduct. See: http://66.129.110.148/press-release-poehlman; http://66.129.110.148/content/case-summary-poehlman-eric-t.
Wakefield’s research misconduct altered the vaccine program in the United Kingdom such that many children did not receive vaccine because Wakefield had published an article in Lancet linking autism with the vaccine (Available at http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c7452.full.). He is banned from working in medicine or research in the UK http://videocast.nih.gov/Summary.asp?File=16828.
Hwang studied stem cells and his proposed findings would have opened the door to research processes in which embryonic cells could help spinal cord injuries or diabetics; for a review of Hwang controversies and lessons learned. See http://www.springerlink.com/content/433m165g32215m28/.
In order to calculate the response rate we used the computation referred to as RR3 in the AAPOR guidelines which is Response Rate = A/(A + B+C*D) where A = Number of completed interviews, B = Eligible non-respondents (eligibility affirmed since they passed the screen in the questionnaire, but did not complete the critical items in the questionnaire to be considered respondents), C = Eligibility rate, where (Eligible respondents + Eligible non-respondents)/(All sample members for whom eligibility is known), and D = Non-respondents for whom eligibility was unknown. (The American Association for Public Opinion Research. 2011. Standard Definitions: Final Dispositions of Case Codes and Outcome Rates for Surveys. 7th edition. AAPOR).
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank Frank Macrina, Vice President for Research, Virginia Commonwealth University, for several thoughtful discussions with us during the design of this study.
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Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the position of the Office of Research Integrity, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), or any component of HHS, and do not reflect the views of Mathematica Policy Research Inc. This study was supported by 1 % OASH funds and conducted under contract 233-02-0086.
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Titus, S.L., Ballou, J.M. Ensuring PhD Development of Responsible Conduct of Research Behaviors: Who’s Responsible?. Sci Eng Ethics 20, 221–235 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-013-9437-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-013-9437-4