FEATURE ARTICLE
Ethical Problems in Academic Research
A survey of doctoral candidates and faculty raises important questions about the ethical environment of graduate education and research
Judith Swazey, Melissa Anderson, Karen Louis
What Is an Ethical Problem?
For the analyses reported in this article, ethical problems were
clustered into three categories used by the National Academy of
Sciences "to delineate... behaviors in the research environment
that require attention." Category 1, misconduct in science,
includes "fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism, in
proposing, or reporting research." Category 2 includes
questionable research practices, such as keeping poor research
records or permitting honorary authorship. As the Academy report
notes, although such practices "violate traditional values of
the research enterprise and... may be detrimental to the research
process," there is "neither broad agreement about [their]
seriousness... nor any consensus on standards for behavior in such
matters." The report's third category, "other
misconduct," includes behavior such as sexual harassment and
violations of government regulations, which may take place in a
research context but "are clearly not unique to the conduct of
science... [and] are subject to generally applicable legal and
social penalties."
The student and the faculty surveys contained 13 identical items on
misconduct, with two additional items on the faculty survey. The
instructions for this section of the student questionnaire were:
"In this program, have you observed or had other
direct evidence of any of the following types of
misconduct? Please indicate the number of graduate students and
faculty members whose misconduct you have
observed/experienced." To make faculty and student responses
more comparable, the faculty questionnaire asked those surveyed to
respond with reference to the department with which they are
currently affiliated and with reference to misconduct observed
within the past five years.
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