Researchers experience of misconduct in research in Malaysian higher education institutions

ABSTRACT

This article offers a qualitative analysis of research misconduct witnessed by researchers during their careers, either by research students or fellow researchers, when conducting or supervising research in their respective departments. Interviews were conducted with 21 participants from various research backgrounds and with a range of research experience, from selected universities in Malaysia. Our study found that misbehavior such as manipulating research data, misrepresentation of research outcomes, plagiarism, authorship disputes, breaching of research protocols, and unethical research management was witnessed by participants among junior and senior researchers, albeit for different reasons. This indicates that despite the steps taken by the institutions to monitor research misconduct, it still occurs in the research community in Malaysian institution of higher education. Therefore, it is important to admit that misconduct still occurs and to create awareness and knowledge of it, particularly among the younger generation of researchers. The study concludes that it is better for researchers to be aware of the behaviors that are considered misconduct as well as the factors that contribute to misconduct to solve this problem.

KEYWORDS:

• Authorship disputes
• breaching research protocol
• higher learning institution
• Malaysia
• plagiarism
• research misconduct

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the research participants for their time and effort involved with the research. We would also like to thank the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education for funding this study under the grant FRGS/1/2017/SSI12/UKM/01/1.

Limitation of the study

This study is limited in that it only involved interviews with a small number of researchers from selected universities; therefore, it cannot be generalized to the whole population of researchers in all the universities in Malaysia. Furthermore, all views and opinions on the topic are the sole opinions of the participants based on their own experiences when conducting or supervising research in their respective institutions.

Competing interest

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia [FRGS/1/2017/SSI12/UKM/01/1].