Assessing the Seriousness of Research Misconduct: Considerations for Sanction Assignment

Abstract

Federal and institutional policies recommend the criterion of “seriousness” as a guide for sanction assignment in cases where researchers have been found to have committed research misconduct. Discrepancies in assessments of seriousness for similar acts of misconduct suggest the need to clarify what might be meant by the seriousness of research misconduct and how the criterion can be used to assign sanctions. This essay demonstrates how determinations of seriousness can differ depending on the set of ethical appeals employed and argues that an expanded lexicon for talking about the seriousness of research misconduct would help to promote fairness and consistency in sanction assignment. It concludes with some policy recommendations for those charged with research misconduct sanction assignment and for those who oversee research integrity at institutional levels.

This article is derived from the author’s Master’s thesis for the Center for Bioethics and Health Law at the University of Pittsburgh, completed in August of 2002. The author thanks Lisa Parker, David Barnard, and John Lyne for their contributions to this research, and Alison Vogelaar for her research assistance.

Keywords:

• research misconduct
• scientific misconduct
• seriousness of misconduct
• sanction assignment
• research integrity
• misconduct investigation

Notes

This article is derived from the author’s Master’s thesis for the Center for Bioethics and Health Law at the University of Pittsburgh, completed in August of 2002. The author thanks Lisa Parker, David Barnard, and John Lyne for their contributions to this research, and Alison Vogelaar for her research assistance.

¹Arriving at a proper definition of research misconduct is beyond the scope of this essay so I defer to that proffered by the OSTP (2000a). David Resnik (2003) reviews the implications of different definitions of research misconduct in an earlier volume of this journal and proposes a broader definition than fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism (FFP).

²This assessment originally appeared in the 1992 NAS report Responsible Science: Ensuring the Integrity of the Research Process.

³While OSTP has put this policy into effect, at the time of publication, OSTP officials believed (personal communication) it had not been adopted by key federal agencies, with exception of the NSF, which adopted the new definition of research misconduct in 2002.

⁴The summary statements of Wilmshurst’s article (marked “online abstract”) appear when using online article retrieval services (e.g., “Expanded Academic Index”) and are not present in the hard copy of the article. I have the online abstract on file and use it here for its succinct and serviceable summary.

⁵Recall that from a legal perspective on intentions, negligence is a punishable offense, even if this view does not conform to the present federal definition of research misconduct.

⁶Some readers might argue that following a higher order moral obligation would place an action in the “not misconduct” category. However, I hold that provided the research protocol itself is ethical, researchers have a prima facie obligation to follow protocol. Following a higher order moral obligation might in exceptional cases, however, be deemed an excusing or mitigating circumstance.

⁷That negative foreseeable consequences from accidents could be greater than those from intentional behaviors reveals how consequentialist and intentionalist schemes produce competing insights. Purely working from foreseeable consequences would suggest that some accidents otherwise excused constitute more serious breaches than intentional behavior, a state of affairs that current policy disallows by asserting that misconduct does not result from error or accident.

⁸In recent years, there has been much debate in legal circles about how punishments should be rendered, and whether federal guidelines or local judgment works best. Because this essay does not furnish a legal analysis, I am bracketing this issue and directing readers interested in this matter to read Dubber (2000) and Ferzan (2002).

CHPS Consulting (2000). Final Report: Analysis of Institutional Policies for Responding to Allegations of Research Misconduct, (Contracted Report No. 282–98–0008: Submitted to Office of Research Integrity, September 29) Columbia, MD

Ferzan, K. K. (2002). Don’t abandon the Model Penal Code yet! Thinking through Simons’s Rethinking, Buffalo Criminal Law Review, 6(1): 185–217