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ADDRESSING
ETHICAL STANDARDS
Addressing
Ethical Standards: Mentor Involvement in Research Misconduct
Between 2004 and 2005,
the ASPB News published a handful of articles addressing the most common
types of ethical misconduct in publishing (http://www.aspb.org/newsletter/ethicalstandards.cfm).
An interesting new study, published in July in the journal Science
and Engineering Ethics (http://www.springerlink.com/content/70w5wu2142w6151g/?p=3aeb5f3fe93c4cd6952337857f55e3c2&pi=4)
and discussed in an article in the August 29 issue of the Chronicle
of Higher Education (CHE; http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/08/4405n.htm),
investigates the extent to which mentors are involved in promoting responsible
research in cases of research misconduct. The authors reviewed the U.S.
Public Health Service misconduct files of the Office of Research Integrity.
They explored the role of the mentor in these cases on such behaviors
as review of source data and teaching of research standards. They found
that nearly three-quarters of the mentors had never examined the trainees’
lab results, and two-thirds never taught the trainees standards for properly
keeping lab notebooks. They concluded that many mentors were poorly prepared
to educate trainees about ethics. Further, as noted in the CHE article,
many scientists were in fact poor role models because they themselves
engaged in possibly unethical research practices.
C. Robertson McClung
c.robertson.mcclung@dartmouth.edu
Nancy Winchester
nancyw@aspb.org
Below we have published
an extract from the CHE article. It is reprinted courtesy of The Chronicle
of Higher Education, copyright 2008.
Scientists
Who Cheated Had Mentors Who Failed to Supervise Them
—Jeffrey Brainard
When young scientists
fake results, their mentors—senior researchers who are supposed to
train them—have neglected their supervisory responsibilities. A new
study of scientific trainees caught cooking their data found that in three-quarters
of the cases, their mentors had never examined the trainees’ laboratory
results. And two-thirds of the supervisors never taught the trainees standards
for properly keeping lab notebooks.
“There was a
troublingly high incidence of missing data or of no lab books at all (even
in the laboratories of renowned scientists),” wrote the authors of
the study, <http://www.springerlink.com/content/70w5wu2142w6151g/?p=3aeb5f3fe93c4cd6952337857f55e3c2&pi=4>,
which appears in the September issue of the journal Science and Engineering
Ethics.
The findings suggest
that principal investigators and laboratory leaders should more frequently
spot-check trainees’ work as well as instruct them about laboratory
procedures and ethics, the authors said. But the mentors need help from
their institutions to do so…
Read this article
in its entirety by visiting http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/08/4405n.htm.
A subscription to the Chronicle of Higher Education is required
to access this article.
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