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Abstract
Academic education largely concerns knowledge and skills. Where there is attention to ethics, this tends to focus on study-related misconduct such as plagiarising assignments and, more recently, methodological misconduct. The current paper argues that it is also essential to teach students about social misconduct in science, with a focus on questionable collaboration practices. First, this would increase future early career researchers’ ability to succeed and avoid academic snares. Enhancing this ability would appear to be an ethical responsibility going hand-in-hand with our attempts at endowing students with skills that we know could be exploited. Second, such teaching would establish authoritative norms about collaborative practices that are and are not acceptable. This would help to adjust scientific attitudes in next generations of graduates, to the benefit of both themselves and science. Teaching on science-specific social misconduct would also naturally tie in with addressing general forms of antisocial conduct which also occur in academia, such as bullying or sexual harassment. The paper provides a framework for defining and recognizing questionable collaboration practices, and for how to provide students with the attitudes, concepts and skills necessary to protect themselves as they enter the reality of the academic arena.
Highlights
Academic education largely concerns knowledge and skills
Researchers known to have bad reputations may be seen to be highly successful at acquiring funding; professors may joke about torturing data until it confesses (Simmons et al, 2011); there may be examples of bullying, e.g., by PIs or professors, being accepted for extended periods of time (Cassell, 2011; McKay et al, 2008); researchers could express or demonstrate plagiarism in its myriad forms beyond just word-for-word copying (Martin, 1994, 2016), including by claiming too much credit for students’ work (Martin, 2013); and so on
This is teaching the ethical opposite of what an academic education should aim to provide – honestly, transparency, collegiality, the willingness to do the hard work of science, and so forth
Summary
Academic education largely concerns knowledge and skills. Where there is attention to ethics, this tends to focus on study-related misconduct such as plagiarising assignments and, more recently, methodological misconduct. Researchers known to have bad reputations may be seen to be highly successful at acquiring funding; professors may joke about torturing data until it confesses (Simmons et al, 2011); there may be examples of bullying, e.g., by PIs or professors, being accepted for extended periods of time (Cassell, 2011; McKay et al, 2008); researchers could express or demonstrate plagiarism in its myriad forms beyond just word-for-word copying (Martin, 1994, 2016), including by claiming too much credit for students’ work (Martin, 2013); and so on Students exposed to such experiences are learning that such behaviour is, at least, not inimical to success in academia, and perhaps it even appears to be necessary. Formulations of general ethics concerning collaboration have been articulated in, e.g., the Montreal Statement on Research Integrity in Cross-Boundary Research Collaborations (developed as part of the 3rd World Conference on Research Integrity, 2013) and the Singapore Statement on Research Integrity (Resnik & Shamoo, 2011), but issues surrounding intellectual exploitation do not appear to be widely recognized as requiring specific attention and labelling (Martin, 2013, 2016)
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