Academic research integrity: Exploring researchers’ perceptions of responsibilities and enablers

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we explore academic researchers’ perceptions of the relative importance of the individual responsibilities in the “Singapore Statement on Research Integrity”. The way researchers view those responsibilities affects the role that research integrity enablers can play in achieving responsible research conduct. Hence, we also explore researchers’ perceptions of five such integrity enablers in this paper: country and university codes of conduct, staff training, mentoring and peer pressure.

Using data from a global online survey of university researchers (n = 302), a Best-Worst Scaling approach was used to elicit researchers’ priorities in different scenarios of responsibilities. In conjunction with latent class analysis, this yielded the implied relative importance of each researcher responsibility. For three of the four homogeneous classes of researchers identified, a different responsibility dominated the hierarchy. For instance, STEM researchers gave precedence to research methods over all other responsibilities. In relation to researchers’ perceptions on the effects of research integrity enablers, our results identified research mentoring relationships and normative peer pressure as important integrity conduits. Further exploration showed that researchers differed in their perceptions on enablers, particularly by academic position, duration of employment and country of employment. Based on our exploratory study, we identify several avenues for further research.

KEYWORDS:

• Research integrity
• responsible conduct of research
• researcher responsibilities
• integrity enablers
• Singapore Statement

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the representatives of the research management societies and university research integrity units who facilitated the distribution of the survey through their networks.

Human research ethics approval was obtained through UNSW (HREAP No HC171045). One of the authors (D. H. Rohr) declared his Conflict of Interest as the Director of Research Ethics & Compliance Support at UNSW prior to submission of the application and during the approval process and monitoring.

Notes

1. The model estimates for the covariates and the modal classifications are available upon request from the corresponding author.

2. The full results are available upon request from the corresponding author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The University of New South Wales (UNSW).