Ethics in Research
Compiled in 2010 by M.A. Van Hove (text in italics) with quotations from the American Physical
Society (http://www.aps.org/programs/education/ethics/index.cfm), underlined for emphasis.
The ethical guidelines discussed below are of the greatest importance to scientists and engineers
in general, not just physicists. Practicing researchers and teachers must apply them daily in their
work. Students must familiarize themselves with these guidelines to become responsible
professionals: they must apply them in their studies, theses and publications.
Do you know what self-plagiarism is? Can you copy from Wikipedia without citation? Who
should be included in a paper as co-authors vs. acknowledged? Are you responsible for all the
statements in a paper? Can you replace raw data by fitted curves? Find out below!
The consequences of unethical behavior can range up to loss of employment, loss of degree (e.g.
PhD) or loss of reputation (Dr. Schön mentioned below suffered all three of these). Worse is
possible when mishandling of money is involved: these cases can go to criminal courts. Nonfinancial cases are generally covered not by laws but by professional guidelines (e.g. the APS
guidelines quoted below) and by institutional regulations; such cases are normally handled by
the employer (universities, research institutions, etc., as in the case of Dr. Schön).
The reality is that ethical behavior in some instances is compromised by pressures to publish and
discover, as well as by the prospect of financial gain from commercialization of certain research
discoveries. The problem is complicated because researchers may be confronted with choices in
which the ethical route is not obvious.
It is useful to draw the analogy between ethics education and safety training. Undoubtedly most
physicists have an inherent desire to be safe, but the extent to which safety procedures are
practiced in the lab depends on a range of factors, including prior experience and an
understanding of what appropriate procedures are and what harm may come from failing to
follow them. Formal safety training is often useful to fill in the gaps not filled by prior
experience. Likewise ethics education can play the role of providing information not available
from prior experience. This role is especially important for those just beginning in the field.
The above website lists several topics. Below, only selected highlights are quoted:
- Conflict of Interest
Often in the research environment we are faced with situations in which we could stand to
benefit personally. These situations can include for example, the use of University resources,
telephone numbers, e-mail or web addresses to support or represent an outside activity,
including businesses, hobbies and political activities. These situations constitute a conflict of
interest.
There are many professional activities of physicists that have the potential for a conflict of
interest. Any professional relationship or action that may result in a conflict of interest must
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be fully disclosed. When objectivity and effectiveness cannot be maintained, the activity
should be avoided or discontinued.
- Data Acquisition
The results of research should be recorded and maintained in a form that allows analysis and
review. Research data should be immediately available to scientific collaborators. Following
publication, the data should be retained for a reasonable period in order to be available
promptly and completely to responsible scientists. Exceptions may be appropriate in certain
circumstances in order to preserve privacy, to assure patent protection, or for similar reasons.
- Educational Concerns
For students, it may be helpful to learn and discuss ethical standards before encountering
them firsthand.
- Health and Safety
In the past, researchers and their supervisors have demonstrated a cavalier attitude towards
these issues, which is inconsistent with current legal and ethical standards. It is essential that
all researchers have training that prepares them for the hazards, and possible emergencies
that they may encounter in the course of their work, and that all laws and regulations relating
to safety are adhered to, and best practices be employed when there are hazards. This means
that there should be compliance with all accepted safety standards. Researchers also have an
obligation to carry out their work in a manner that does not threaten the health and safety of
others, and to be forthcoming in identifying new risks and to be rapid in their response to
hazardous conditions and emergencies that may arise. Health and safety standards are usually
rigorously followed in large laboratory settings. It is important to recognize that they must
be followed even in the most modest of research settings.
- Human Subjects Research
While it is not frequent, occasionally physicists perform research involving human subjects.
Examples of such research include: educational studies, biophysics investigations, and
surveys.
See also Ethical and Professional Guidelines of the American Chemical Society at:
http://portal.acs.org/portal/PublicWebSite/careers/ethics/index.htm
- Issues of Bias
Webster's New World Dictionary defines bias as “a mental leaning or inclination; partiality;
prejudice; bent.” While it is probably impossible to eliminate bias, each person can strive to
be aware of his or her preferences and alert to situations where the bias can be damaging to
the science or ones colleagues. Also, one can become a careful observer of others and take
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action to counteract the unfair or inappropriate consequences of biases, especially those that
work to exclude or diminish people from different backgrounds than the majority.
- Mentoring
Group leaders, from department chairs to research directors, have an ethical obligation to
create an environment that supports fair treatment and professional development
opportunities for all group members.
- Publication Practices
The APS Guidelines for Professional Conduct state that authorship should be limited to those
who have made a significant contribution to the concept, design, execution or interpretation
of the research study. All those who have made significant contributions should be offered
the opportunity to be listed as authors. Other individuals who have contributed to the study
should be acknowledged, but not identified as authors. The sources of financial support for
the project should be disclosed.
Plagiarism [i.e. copying from others’ work without their authorization or acknowledgment]
constitutes unethical scientific behavior and is never acceptable. Proper acknowledgement of
the work of others used in a research project must always be given. Further, it is the
obligation of each author to provide prompt retractions or corrections of errors in published
works. Even when it is not clear who wrote the original text, copying without
acknowledgment is plagiarism: for example, copying from Wikipedia without citing that
source is plagiarism.
Self-plagiarism is also unethical. An example is re-submitting a proposal that was already
funded, to get a second round of funding for the same project. Hong Kong’s RGC bans
investigators who do this from submitting further proposals for 5 years.
In any text it should be clear which words and which ideas are due to the author(s) and
which are due to others.
All collaborators share some degree of responsibility for any paper they coauthor. Some
coauthors have responsibility for the entire paper as an accurate, verifiable, report of the
research. These include, for example, coauthors who are accountable for the integrity of the
critical data reported in the paper, carry out the analysis, write the manuscript, present major
findings at conferences, or provide scientific leadership for junior colleagues.
Coauthors who make specific, limited, contributions to a paper are responsible for them, but
may have only limited responsibility for other results. While not all coauthors may be
familiar with all aspects of the research presented in their paper, all collaborations should
have in place an appropriate process for reviewing and ensuring the accuracy and validity of
the reported results, and all coauthors should be aware of this process.
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Every coauthor should have the opportunity to review the manuscript before its submission.
All coauthors have an obligation to provide prompt retractions or correction of errors in
published works. Any individual unwilling or unable to accept appropriate responsibility for
a paper should not be a coauthor.
Authors have an obligation to their colleagues and the physics community to include a set of
references that communicates the precedents, sources, and context of the reported work.
Proper referencing gives credit to those whose research has informed or led to the work in
question, helps to avoid duplication of effort, and increases the value of a paper by guiding
the reader to related materials. It is the responsibility of authors to have surveyed prior work
in the area and to include relevant references. Proper and complete referencing is an essential
part of any physics research publication. Deliberate omission of a pertinent author or
reference is unethical and unacceptable. Well-known common knowledge (such as the laws of
physics) need not be acknowledged.
- Responsible Conduct of Research
Scientists and educators have a duty to obey rules and regulations regarding the responsible
conduct of research and ethical participation in the activities of their department, laboratory,
or company.
Fabrication of data or selective reporting of data with the intent to mislead or deceive is an
egregious [i.e. very bad] departure from the expected norms of scientific conduct, as is the
theft of data or research results from others.
Collaborations are expected to have a process to archive and verify the research record; to
facilitate internal communication and allow all authors to be fully aware of the entire work;
and respond to questions concerning the joint work and enable other responsible scientists to
share the data. All members of a collaboration should be familiar with, and understand, the
process.
Peer review [i.e. refereeing papers and proposals] can serve its intended function only if the
members of the scientific community are prepared to provide thorough, fair and objective
evaluations based on requisite expertise. Although peer review can be difficult and timeconsuming, scientists have an obligation to participate in the process. Privileged information
or ideas that are obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for
competitive gain. Reviewers should disclose conflicts of interest resulting from direct
competitive, collaborative, or other relationships with any of the authors, and avoid cases in
which such conflicts preclude an objective evaluation.
In addition:
All co-investigators of a research proposal should be given the opportunity to approve the final
version of the proposal before submission.
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It is unethical to add co-authors only to increase the chance of approval of a proposal and then
to drop them to avoid sharing the funds.
It is unethical to take someone else’s idea, whether published or unpublished (e.g. spoken in a
seminar or meeting, or written in a proposal or manuscript that you have been asked to review)
and to present it as your own idea. In case of a dispute, the dates of publication or acceptance
for publication of an idea are generally used to determine precedence.
An instructive and famous recent case: Scientific misconduct by Dr. Jan Hendrik Schön of Bell
Laboratories.
This case gave rise to some of the APS guidelines quoted above.
(The following text is quoted from the official 129-page report by an external committee,
http://publish.aps.org/reports/lucentrep.pdf, with my underlining for emphasis. That report
includes numerous graphic examples of specific scientific misconduct.)
In late May 2002, the management of Bell Labs formed a committee to investigate “the
possibility of scientific misconduct, the validity of the data and whether or not proper scientific
methodology was used in papers by Hendrik Schön, et al., that are being challenged in the
scientific community”.
These Final Allegations can be grouped into 3 classes:
• Substitution of data (substitution of whole figures, single curves and partial curves in different
or the same paper to represent different materials, devices or conditions)
• Unrealistic precision of data (precision beyond that expected in a real experiment or requiring
unreasonable statistical probability)
• Results that contradict known physics (behavior inconsistent with stated device parameters and
prevailing physical understanding, so as to suggest possible misrepresentation of data)
The Committee’s main findings and conclusions can be summarized as follows. By all accounts,
Hendrik Schön is a hard working and productive scientist. If valid, the work he and his coauthors
report would represent a remarkable number of major breakthroughs in condensed-matter
physics and solid-state devices.
Except for the provision of starting materials by others, all device fabrication, physical
measurement and data processing in the work in question were carried out (with minor
exceptions) by Hendrik Schön alone, with no participation by any coauthor or other colleague.
None of the most significant physical results was witnessed by any coauthor or other colleague.
Proper laboratory records were not systematically maintained by Hendrik Schön in the course of
the work in question. In addition, virtually all primary (raw) electronic data files were deleted by
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Hendrik Schön, reportedly because the old computer available to him lacked sufficient memory.
No working devices with which one might confirm claimed results are presently available,
having been damaged in measurement, damaged in transit or simply discarded. Finally, key
processing equipment no longer produces the unparalleled results that enabled many of the key
experiments. Hence, it is not possible to confirm or refute directly the validity of the claims in
the work in question.
The most serious allegations regarding the work in question relate to possible manipulation and
misrepresentation of data. These allegations speak directly to the question of scientific
misconduct. The Committee carefully investigated each of these allegations and came to a
specific conclusion in each case.
The evidence that manipulation and misrepresentation of data occurred is compelling. In its
mildest form, whole data sets were substituted to represent different materials or devices.
Hendrik Schön acknowledges that the data are incorrect in many of these instances. He states
that these substitutions could have occurred by honest mistake. The recurrent nature of such
mistakes suggests a deeper problem. At a minimum, Hendrik Schön showed reckless disregard
for the sanctity of data in the value system of science. His failure to retain primary data files
compounds the problem.
More troublesome are the substitutions of single curves or even parts of single curves, in
multiple figures representing different materials or devices, and the use of mathematical
functions to represent real data. Hendrik Schön acknowledges these practices in many instances,
but states that they were done to achieve a more convincing representation of behavior that was
nonetheless observed. Such practices are completely unacceptable and represent scientific
misconduct.
One of the most troublesome cases is that of superconductivity in polythiophene. Here, identical
curves appear multiple times in whole or in part in a single figure. Hendrik Schön acknowledges
that these data are not valid but cannot explain how they arose. In the view of the Committee, it
is not possible that this set of curves represent real data and therefore this is a clear, unambiguous
case of scientific misconduct.
In the end, the Committee concluded that, of the 24 Final Allegations examined, Hendrik Schön
committed scientific misconduct in 16, some of which were interrelated. Of the remaining 8, 2
were judged to have no clear relationship to publications, while 6 were troubling but did not
provide compelling evidence of scientific misconduct.
The Committee finds all coauthors of Hendrik Schön in the work in question completely cleared
of scientific misconduct. The Committee also finds no evidence that the laboratory practices of
any coauthor of Hendrik Schön in the work in question are outside the accepted practices of their
fields.
In addition to addressing the question of scientific misconduct, the Committee also addressed the
question whether the coauthors of Hendrik Schön exercised appropriate professional
responsibility in ensuring the validity of data and physical claims in the papers in question. By
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virtue of their coauthorship, they implicitly endorse the validity of the work. There is no
implication here of scientific misconduct; the issue is one of professional responsibility.
The Committee found this to be an extremely difficult issue, which the scientific community has
not considered carefully. Therefore, no clear, widely accepted standards of behavior exist. In
order to proceed, the Committee adopted, for working purposes, a minimal set of principles that
it feels should be honored in collaborative research. At its core, the question of professional
responsibility involves the balance between the trust necessary in any collaborative research and
the responsibility all researchers bear for the veracity of the results with which they are
associated. The Committee does not endorse the view that each coauthor is responsible for the
entirety of a collaborative endeavor: the relative responsibility of researchers with very different
expertise, seniority and levels of participation must be considered.
The Committee examined this question for each coauthor, considering the nature of their
participation and their differing degrees of responsibility. The Committee concluded that the
coauthors of Hendrik Schön in the work in question have, in the main, met their responsibilities,
but that in one case questions remain that the Committee felt unqualified to resolve, given the
absence of a broader consensus on the nature of the responsibilities of participants in
collaborative research endeavors.
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