Singapore Statement Urges Global Consensus on Research Integrity

Scientists, scientific journals, and research institutions must adhere to an international set of ethical standards and consider the social implications of their work, says a new statement from 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity, co-sponsored by AAAS.

The Singapore Statement on Research Integrity, released 22 September, acknowledges different cultural and national standards for scientific research. But, it concludes “there are also principles and professional responsibilities that are fundamental to the integrity of research wherever it is undertaken.”

The succinct one-page document lists 14 responsibilities for researchers. Individual scientists should share research findings openly and promptly, disclose conflicts of interest, and take responsibility for the “trustworthiness” of their own work, the statement says. Institutions should create policies and work environments that encourage research integrity and institutions and journals should have clear procedures for addressing research misconduct.

The statement also notes four principles that underlie the statement’s responsibilities:

• honesty in all aspects of research;
  
• accountability in the conduct of research;
  
• professional courtesy and fairness in working with others; and
  
• good stewardship of research on behalf of others

“The globalization of research requires the globalization of basic understandings of responsible behavior in research,” the members of the Singapore Statement Drafting Committee wrote in a news release accompanying the document. “The Singapore Statement is intended to encourage and further the development of these understandings.”

Policymakers, university leaders, publishers, and government ministers first drafted the statement at the conference, held 21-24 July in Singapore. The conference was supported by science associations from China, Japan, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States. More than 300 delegates from 51 countries contributed to the final statement.

Three officials represented AAAS at the conference: Mark S. Frankel, director of the AAAS Scientific Freedom, Responsibility and Law Program; Gerald Epstein, director of the AAAS Center for Science, Technology and Security Policy; and AAAS Senior Program Associate Deborah Runkle. Frankel and Epstein spoke to the conference about responsible advocacy and the ethics of dual-use research, respectively, while Runkle co-chaired a session on digital plagiarism.

The Singapore attendees sought a set of “international norms and standards related to research integrity that would accommodate national differences,” said Frankel, who helped organize this year’s conference.

The harmonization of these standards is part of a larger commitment by AAAS to support the international integration of scientific values. The effort also has included three years of top-level discussions between the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) and AAAS to coordinate work on scientific ethics.

Seeking an international agreement on research integrity is one way to pursue harmonization, said Epstein. “Although many different groups have different conceptions of what a code of conduct should focus on,” he said, “there isn’t any culture in which making up data is good.”

Frankel added that the Singapore Statement “is a start to what we hope will be a global discussion of the issues raised at the conference and a basis for future national or regional ethics guidelines.”

Becky Ham

22 September 2010

SINGAPORE STATEMENT on RESEARCH INTEGRITY

Background

The principles and responsibilities set out in the Singapore Statement on Research Integrity represent the first international effort to encourage the development of unified policies, guidelines and codes of conduct, with the long-range goal of fostering greater integrity in research worldwide.

The Statement is the product of the collective effort and insights of the 340 individuals from 51 countries who participated in the 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity. These included researchers, funders, representatives of research institutions (universities and research institutes) and research publishers. The Statement was developed by a small drafting committee (listed below); discussed and commented upon before, during and after the 2nd World Conference; and then finalized for release and global use on 22 September 2010.

Purpose

Publication of the Singapore Statement on Research Integrity is intended to challenge governments, organizations and researchers to develop more comprehensive standards, codes and policies to promote research integrity both locally and on a global basis.

The principles and responsibilities summarized in the Statement provide a foundation for more expansive and specific guidance worldwide. Its publication and dissemination are intended to make it easier for others to provide the leadership needed to promote integrity in research on a global basis, with a common approach to the fundamental elements of responsible research practice.

The Statement is applicable to anyone who does research, to any organization that sponsors research and to any country that uses research results in decision-making. Good research practices are expected of all researchers: government, corporate and academic. To view and download copies of the Statement, click on the links to the right. >>>
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Disclaimer. The Singapore Statement on Research Integrity was developed as part of the 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity, 21-24 July 2010, in Singapore, as a global guide to the responsible conduct of research. It is not a regulatory document and does not represent the official policies of the countries and organizations that funded and/or participated in the Conference. For official policies, guidance, and regulations relating to research integrity, appropriate national bodies and organizations should be consulted. Posted 22 September 2010;
Statement Drafting Committee:
Nicholas Steneck and Tony Mayer, Co-chairs, 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity
Melissa Anderson, Chair, Organizing Committee, 3rd World Conference on Research Integrity

More retractions from Nobelist - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences

Two prominent journals have retracted papers by Nobel laureate Linda Buck today because she was "unable to reproduce [the] key findings" of experiments done by her former postdoctoral researcher Zhihua Zou, according to a statement made by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC), where Buck worked at the time of the publications.

These retractions, a 2006 Science paper and a 2005 Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS) paper, are tied to a 2001 Nature paper that she retracted in 2008, due to the inability "to reproduce the reported findings" and "inconsistencies between some of the figures and data published in the paper and the original data," according to the retraction. Zou was the first author on all three papers and responsible for conducting the experiments.

The FHCRC is currently conducting an investigation into the issue, said Kristen Woodward, senior media relations manager, but no findings of misconduct have been made. John Dahlberg of the Office of Research Integrity declined to comment on the matter.

The paper in PNAS, which has been cited 61 times according to ISI, describes how smells from substances with similar molecular structures elicit "strikingly similar" neuronal patterns in the olfactory cortex of mice brains across individuals, supporting the presence of "olfactory maps" that follow "an underlying logic," according to the paper. The Science paper, cited 73 times, furthers the research and supports that mixed smells, such as chocolate and citrus, activate neurons in the olfactory cortex that chocolate or citrus do not when presented individually, which may explain why these mixtures tend to smell like completely different substances to humans.

Fortunately, the retractions will not have a large impact on the field, Donald Wilson, an olfactory researcher at New York University and Nathan Kline Institute, told The Scientist in an email. "The story of how cortical odor processing occurs doesn't change," he said. "Work in our own lab and others have now also shown the highly distributed, sparse nature of odor processing in the olfactory cortex, and the complex processes involved in dealing with odor mixtures, much as these two now retracted papers showed."

Zou was unavailable for comment, as his current location is unknown, according to FHCRC. After completing his post doctoral research with Buck at FHCRC in 2005, Zou took an assistant professor position at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston. In November of 2008, however, Zou was laid off from the institution, along with 2,400 other UTMB staff members, after Hurricane Ike ripped the university apart that September, according to Raul Reyes, the director of media relations at the UTMB.

In 2008, Zou wrote in a statement provided by UTMB that he was "disappointed" by the Nature retraction, and denied any misconduct on his part. While Zou agreed to the Nature retraction, he "declined to sign" the Science retraction, as reported online today in Science. But "we have no information to suspect misconduct," Natasha Pinol, senior communications officer at the AAAS/Science Office of Public Programs, told The Scientist in an email.

In addition to the irreproducible results, the PNAS paper also contained "figures inconsistent with original data," according to the FHCRC statement. While the PNAS retraction is "not embargoed," according to Managing Editor Daniel Salsbury, the journal refused to share any information with The Scientist before deadline, noting that the retraction would appear online after 2:00 p.m. EDT this afternoon.

The research that won Buck the 2004 Nobel Prize, which she shared with olfactory researcher Richard Axel of Columbia University "for their discoveries of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system," was unrelated to the research in the retracted papers.

Read more: More retractions from Nobelist - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/57699/#comments#ixzz10Qk5Xy3p

A Reflection on Plagiarism, Patchwriting, and the Engineering Master's Thesis

Edward J. Eckel, 

edward.eckel@wmich.edu

How many times has a graduate student asked you questions such as the following: "How many words do I need to change so I'm not plagiarizing?" or "If my professor gives me his article or patent and tells me to go ahead and 'use it', do I need to cite it?" Such questions indicate a profound need for clarification of issues like plagiarism and attributing sources. This need is a result of a disconnect between expectations for graduate students in the sciences and technology, and how they are being educated to meet those expectations. >>>

When is self-plagiarism ok? - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences

When Robert Barbato of the E. Philip Saunders College of Business at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) heard he was being accused of plagiarizing his own work, he was a bit surprised. "I can't plagiarize myself -- those are my own words," he said.

And he is not alone in his views. Some scientists and publishers argue that it's "unavoidable" for scientists to re-use portions of their own text (not images or data, of course) from previous papers, and doing so may even be good practice. But others disagree, including many journals -- who have retracted papers in response.

"There are many ways you can say the same thing even when it comes to very technical language," said Miguel Roig of St. John's University, who has written extensively about plagiarism in academic literature. "It's a matter of what some have labeled poor scholarly etiquette."

In Barbato's case, the institutional committee formed to review the case unanimously decided to dismiss it. While the authors had reused some text in the introduction and methodology sections in two papers they had submitted simultaneously on gender differences in entrepreneurial business endeavors, the data were different and the papers reached vastly different conclusions. "Nobody saw anything wrong with this really," recalled Patrick Scanlon of RIT's department of communication, who served on the committee.

"Sometimes [text reuse] is just unavoidable," agreed Catriona Fennell, director of journal services at Elsevier. "Really, how many different ways can you say the same thing?" Because scientists tend to study the same topic over many years or even their entire careers, some aspects of their research papers, particularly the literature review and methodology, will be repeated. Once they've figured out how to word it succinctly and accurately, some argue, it's best left unchanged. "You're laying the groundwork for an ongoing discussion [so] making changes might actually be a bad idea," Scanlon said. "It would muddy the waters."

Indeed, even editors that tend to be on the strict side when it comes to text recycling make exceptions. Anesthesia & Analgesia recently pulled a paper due to the offense, as reported on the Retraction Watch blog, but the journal's Editor-in-Chief Steven Shafer said that the publication does not retract papers that only reuse text in the methodology section. "This is a very difficult area," admitted Shafer. While the recently retracted paper contained "multiple areas of duplicated verbatim or nearly verbatim text throughout," he said, not all cases are so straightforward, and each one "must be a judgment call."

With evidence that duplicate publications are on the rise, and estimates of more than 200,000 duplicates already archived in Medline, the scientific community is in dire need of better guidelines as to where to draw the line with respect to self-plagiarism -- and a better way of catching those that cross it.

"It's unfortunately a very gray area," said Jonathan Bailey, a copyright and plagiarism consultant and a writer for the website Plagiarism Today. "[When people] come to me asking what the lines are, I always have to say the same thing: 'You're going to have to talk to the publication you're submitting to.'"

The problem is that most publications don't have "hard and fast rules," Fennell said of Elsevier's journals. The most comprehensive guidelines with respect to self-plagiarism come from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), but these guidelines refer only to truly "redundant publication," in which authors are attempting to pawn off old research as fresh and new. They contain no advice about scientists re-using their own text.

"There's nothing that says you can't have over 30 percent of your introduction being highly similar," said Harold "Skip" Garner, executive director of the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, who has published several articles on plagiarism in scientific publishing. "There's nothing like that because it's impossible to calculate."

The good news is that with the bulk of publishing now done electronically and the advent of text similarity software to recognize possible cases of redundant publishing, identifying copied text is becoming a much less onerous task than it used to be. eTBLAST, for example, is a free text comparison program that searches the millions of abstracts archived in Medline, as well as a few other publically available databases. Once the publication spots a possible duplication, it's added to the Déjà vu database of highly similar citations, where scientists can evaluate and comment on the entries.

Probably the most widely used program to spot plagiarism in scientific publishing is Crosscheck, launched in June 2008 by CrossRef. A total of 119 publishers (nearly 50,000 journals) subscribe to the plagiarism detection program, including Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, and Springer, who donate their full text content to the database, which currently holds some 25 million pieces of scientific literature, and is "growing steadily," according to CrossRef Product Manager Kirsty Meddings. Crosscheck's subscribers can scan the database with the same iThenticate software used by Turnitin to check for possible duplications.

So far, the journals that have put the technology to use say it's working. Of the 60 papers flagged as having a high percentage of overlap with other publications in the first three months that the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics used Crosscheck (starting last March), "about 60 percent were self plagiarism," said David Marshall, the publisher at SIAM. "That is the majority of what we're uncovering."

"In my view, [having these programs] is one of the best things that ever happened because it puts scientists on notice," Roig said. Indeed, some journals have taken to explicitly announcing that they use Crosscheck in their instructions to authors, and/or post the Crosscheck logo on their website, hoping that just the threat of getting caught will act as a deterrent.

Even with these programs, however, editors must be careful, Bailey warned -- even high degree of text similarity can sometimes be legit. "It really is about context," Fennell agreed. "It's good software, but it doesn't replace human judgment."

The problem now is how to weed through the hundreds of thousands of suspected cases of duplicated publications currently in the scientific literature. "It's one thing to be a deterrent and preventative in the future," said Garner, but "who's going to clean up the mess that's already there?"

Chinese journal finds 31% of submissions plagiarized

Yuehong Zhang
Nature 467 , Page: 153  Date published: (09 September 2010)
doi:10.1038/467153d

Since October 2008, we have detected unoriginal material in a staggering 31% of papers submitted to the Journal of Zhejiang University–Science (692 of 2,233 submissions). The publication, designated as a key academic journal by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, was the first in China to sign up for CrossRef's plagiarism-screening service CrossCheck (Nature 466, 167; 2010).

We are therefore campaigning for authors, researchers and editors to be on the alert for plagiarism and to work against cultural misunderstandings. In ancient China, for example, students were typically encouraged to copy the words of their masters.

To this end, we have given lectures and written three papers (including Y. H. Zhang Learn. Publ. 23, 9–14; 2010) that have been widely publicized in China's media (see http://go.nature.com/dPey7X; in Chinese) and reported in CrossRef's quarterly online news magazine (see http://go.nature.com/icUwvh). Our website displays the CrossCheck logo to remind authors of their responsibilities.

Other Chinese journals are also policing plagiarism, using software launched in 2008 by China's Academic Journals Electronic Publishing House and Tongfang Knowledge Network Technology in Beijing.