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Ethical Issues
Ethics in Research
This section is mainly concerned with the ethics relevant to the process of data collection, presenting the findings, and giving due credit to those who deserve it. To ensure that the research is ethically conducted, researchers should focus on
- research integrity;
- integrity in disseminating research findings; and
- giving credit to those who deserve it.
The following discussion addresses all of the above concerns in more detail.
The potential issues that could compromise the ethical research conduct are
- trimming;
- cooking;
- forging;
- plagiarism; and
- not recognizing contributions and authorship.
Trimming
Definition: The smoothing of irregularities to make the data look extremely accurate and precise.
Example (from Vrana slides):
Trimming irregular data in a scatter plot to make the pattern look smooth:
A student prepares a “scatter graph” that demonstrates the time dependent effect. Unfortunately, several points do not follow the relationship.
Peers suggest dropping the lowest point because “the cells were obviously dead” and the highest point because it is an “outlier.”
This change would be considered trimming irregular data in a scatter plot to make the pattern look smooth. See the circled dots in the chart below; these are the "outliers.”
Chart 2.1. Trimming Example Scatter Graph
Deleting the outliers will strengthen the relationship that the researcher reports. For more understanding about the outliers and the strength of the relationship, wait until the discussion of scatter plots later in this course. For now, this example indicates that the data has been trimmed to show stronger correlation.
Cooking
Definition: “[R]etaining only those results that fit the theory and discarding others.”
Example: Discarding experimental results that do not fit the researcher’s hypothesis and keeping only those that fit.
Forging
Definition: “[I]nventing some or all of the research data that are reported and even reporting experiments to obtain data that were never performed.”
Example: Making up data that were never found in an experiment. Suppose a researcher was collecting information for a study about how sleep affected employees' performance. Rather than asking the employees about how many hours they slept, the researcher decided to make up a dataset without performing data collection. This is called forging.
Authorship
Definition: “Authorship on a scientific paper should be limited to those individuals who have contributed directly to the design and execution of the experiments and who have participated in the preparation of the manuscript.”
Example: In a co-authored project, the authors are listed based on their level of contribution. When there is equal contribution, they are mentioned alphabetically. This is a general practice; however, the authorship should be discussed and agreed upon among the collaborators before publication of the report.
Giving Credit
Definition: “Attribution of credit involves the acknowledgements of individuals who have contributed time, money, or materials to a scientific endeavor.”