Toxic Labs and Research Misconduct
Toxic lab environments and PIs can lead to more than just work fatigue -- they can lead to research misconduct, as well.
Articles for tag: Compliance
Navigating the Fly America Act
Understanding the Fly America Act.
Salami Slicing: A Recipe for Research Misconduct
Salami slicing, breaking a paper on a single study up into smaller “slices” and publishing them in more than one journal, is broadly discouraged and considered unethical. Why does the practice persist? What do PIs believe are the benefits of doing it? Two problems Breaking up research into smaller slices can have serious consequences for ...
What Does Intuitive AI and ChatGPT Mean for Research?
Will an intuitive AI program like OpenAI’s ChatGPT be able to imitate the vocabulary, grammar and most importantly, content, that a scientist or researcher would want to publish? And should it be able to?
Gone, Baby, Gone
How important is a data management plan for researchers?
Unintentional Plagiarism: Is it Avoidable?
Plagiarism is the use of someone else’s words, ideas, or visuals as if they were your original work. Unintentional plagiarism is plagiarism that results from the disregard for proper scholarly procedures. It’s much easier to commit than one would think, and it has toppled giants in the research enterprise. From 2007-2020, the National Science Foundation ...
Is it Teaching or is it Research: When Do You Need an IRB?
When does a professor need an Institutional Review Board (IRB) to provide oversight on their project?
Diversify Your Human Subjects
Diversity and inclusion is important in human subjects research. You want a "representative sample," not a "convenience sample."
Auditors Read Your Technical Reports Too!
You know sponsors read your financial reports, but did you know they audit your technical reports, too?
Too Close for Comfort: Human Subjects Research in the Age of COVID
How close is six feet? Try to picture two golden retrievers standing nose to tail. Or a regular mattress. Or even the width of the front of your car. All of these measure in at about six feet. But what happens when human research subjects need to be closer than six feet away from the research team?
Corporate Compliance and Ethics Week
November 1-7 is a week set aside for reviewing your university’s rules and regulations. Creating a culture of compliance is important.
Science Integrity
Some European institutions, according to a recently published Nature article, have started to rely on science integrity inspectors to review papers prior to submission for errors in manuscripts.1 So far, this has not caught on in the United States. The question is, should it? One of the institutes highlighted in the Nature article was the ...
Research Recruitment in the Age of Social Media
What if you were scrolling through your social media feed and an advertisement for a hair loss treatment kept popping up. Now say you were bald. So, being interested in this new hair loss treatment, you made an appointment at the location described in the ad. When you got there, you were given the choice ...
Reproducibility, Rigor and Rigmarole
Imagine a hypothetical “Dear Abby” letter to the science community: “I am the principal investigator and corresponding author on a paper detailing research findings in our lab. A leading investigator at another university contacted me and states that she cannot duplicate our results. I re-ran the samples analyzed by my post-doc and I couldn’t either. ...
Growing Pains: Scalable Compliance
Scalable Compliance Reliance The idea of scalable compliance is that an organization or department maintain efficiency as it grows in size. It is the ability to adjust to an increase in workload by adding resources, like more employees, to the system. Imagine you have a beet patch on a small farm. You’re a regular Dwight ...
3 Ways to Prevent University Research Misconduct
There are so many instances of university research misconduct that the spotlight is shining brighter on institutions now than ever. Not the good kind of spotlight, either. Findings involving university research can be either good or bad. We celebrate, publish and acknowledge scientific contributions at universities. After all, research is part of our mission. Conversely, ...
In Fraud We Trust: Top 5 Cases of Misconduct in University Research
There’s a thin line between madness and immorality. This idea of the “mad scientist” has taken on a charming, even glorified perception in popular culture. From the campy portrayal of Nikola Tesla in the first issue of Superman, to Dr. Frankenstein, to Dr. Emmet Brown of Back to the Future, there’s no question Hollywood has ...
Student Drivers of Research: The Benefit of Launching a Student IRB Program
Do you remember the feeling you had the first time sitting at the wheel of a car? Were you overcome by the feeling of excitement, anticipation, fear, or perhaps a combination of them all? For many, obtaining a driver’s license is a rite of passage; a symbol that you are equipped with both the knowledge ...
Little White Lies
To comply is to obey, or conform to instruction or official requirements. In a perfect world, research non-compliance wouldn’t occur and following the rules would be a behavioral norm. But the reality is, to err is human.
