Comment on “Improving research misconduct policies” by Redman & Caplan

Abstract

A comment on “Improving research misconduct policies” by Barbara K Redman & Arthur L Caplan.

We read with great interest the recent article by Redman and Caplan “Improving research misconduct policies”. While we generally agree with the authors’ main premise that most regulatory policies aimed at addressing research misconduct are not sufficiently informed by empirical evidence, we would like to respond to their critique on two particular points.

First, we wholeheartedly concur with their argument that policies related to research integrity need to be more grounded in social psychological theory and data. Unfortunately, in making their argument, they seem themselves to overlook a great deal of existing evidence. For many years, researchers focused on research integrity, including members of our own team, have been applying concepts, theories, and measures from the field of social psychology to study how the research environment influences research‐related behavior.

As early as 2005, discussions of the potential importance of the social psychological concept of “organizational justice” appear in the literature 1, 2, 3, along with other social psychological concepts such as identity, over‐commitment, and intrinsic drive 4. Likewise, there has been some empirical investigation of environmental factors such as the influence of observing peer behavior 5, and expectations for self‐funding and competitive pressures that may stimulate undesirable research‐related behaviors 6. The recently released NASEM report, Fostering Integrity in Research, also references a great deal of extant social and behavioral science theory and evidence, affirming their value for informing research integrity policies 7.

Second, we also concur with their recommendation to “Document institutions’ measures to create a research environment that promotes the responsible conduct of research and discourages RM”. We are concerned, however, by omission of relevant citations for their second recommendation to “Validate instruments to measure organizational research climate for internal use to identify toxic climates…”. It puzzles us that the authors did not acknowledge the work of our own research team over almost a decade in developing and propagating a validated and widely used instrument for assessing the integrity of organizational research climates in academic research, the Survey of Organizational Research Climate (SOURCE).

With a large‐scale validation study 8 in conjunction with a second paper documenting associations between SOURCE scales and self‐reported, research‐related behaviors, including formally defined misconduct 9, we have subsequently implemented this tool in a nationwide pilot RCT employing the SOURCE as a “reporting and feedback” tool in 42 research services across the US Veterans Affairs health care system, with the main outcomes of this latest research forthcoming 10.

Over the past several years, we have also developed an online tool for both fielding the SOURCE and generating tailored feedback reports, hosted by the National Center for Professional & Research Ethics at University of Illinois, Urbana‐Champaign (http://ethicscenter.csl.illinois.edu/source/). By retaining de‐identified and partially aggregated data of institutions that have used this tool (with their permission—including five Big Ten Universities at this point, with others in progress or starting soon) we are also developing a norming database and comparative data incorporated into the reports given back to participating universities. Such comparative data add value by establishing standards, and demonstrating to university leaders where their climates stand in comparison with those standards and to their peers. We hope Redman and Caplan are pleased to know that their recommendations for future work are already instantiated.

Comment on: BK Redman & AL Caplan (April 2017)See reply: BK Redman & AL Caplan (in this issue)