On “intent” in research misconduct

ABSTRACT

Research misconduct, broadly defined as acts of fabrication, falsification and/or plagiarism, violate the value system of science, cost significant wastage of public resources, and in more extreme cases endanger research participants or members of the society at large. Determination of culpability in research misconduct requires establishment of intent on the part of the respondent or perpetrator. However, “intent” is a state of mind, and its perception is subjective, unequivocal evidence for which would not be as readily established compared to the objective evidence available for the acts themselves. Here, we explore the concept of “intent” in research misconduct, how it is framed in criminological/legal terms, and narrated from a psychological perspective. Based on these, we propose a framework whereby lines of questioning and investigation, as defined by legislative terms and informed by the models and tools of psychology, could help in establishing a preponderance of evidence for culpable intent. Such a framework could be useful in research misconduct adjudications and in delivering sanctions.

KEYWORDS:

• Culpable intent
• intent
• research misconduct
• research ethics

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to both reviewers whose constructive comments helped improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no conflict of interest to declare.

Notes

1. This definition of research misconduct is based on the US Office of Science and Technology Policy. A concise expression for this definition can be found in a web page of the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) https://ori.hhs.gov/definition-research-misconduct.

2. QRP is defined by the Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training (FORRT) as “A range of activities that intentionally or unintentionally distort data in favor of a researcher’s own hypotheses – or omissions in reporting such practices – including selective inclusion of data, hypothesizing after the results are known (HARKing), and p-hacking.” Popularized by John et al. (2012). QRP is also defined by Banks et al. (2016) as “design, analytic or reporting practices that have been questioned because of the potential for the practice to be employed with the purpose of presenting biased evidence in favour of an assertion.”

3. According to the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (https://publicationethics.org/), journals should have a clearly described process for handling allegations, in whatever manner these are brought to the journal’s or publisher’s attention. However, investigation of allegations of research misconduct on the part of journals and publishers (as a consequence of whistleblowing or post-publication peer review) are often limited to the paper(s) concerned, and by the availability of materials, such as the published paper, manuscript versions submitted to the journal and other documents the author(s) might provide (for example, raw or primary data). Journals and publishers would often inform and defer broader or more in-depth RM investigations to the authors’ institutions.

4. RM could potentially be analyzed and understood through, for example, Wikström’s Situational Action Theory (SAT) (https://www.cac.crim.cam.ac.uk/resou/sat). A core proposition of SAT is the situational model and the PEA hypothesis, which states that “People ultimately commit acts of crime because they find them acceptable in the circumstance (and there is no relevant and strong enough deterrent) or because they fail to act in accordance with their own personal morals (i.e., fail to exercise self-control) in circumstances when externally pressurised to act otherwise” Relevant to our discussion here is how the SAT accounts for RM “intent”

5. The culpable states of mind, as summarized at Cornell’s Legal Information Institute’s website (https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/mens_rea.) is as follows:Acting purposely – The defendant had an underlying conscious object to act.Acting knowingly – The defendant is practically certain that the conduct will cause a particular result.Acting recklessly – The defendant consciously disregarded a substantial and unjustified risk.Acting negligently – The defendant was not aware of the risk but should have been aware of the risk.

6. This is metaphorically analogous to how the innate immune system recognizes invading microbial pathogens. The innate immune system’s pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) recognize pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) which are not whole bacterium or virion, but rather bits pieces or their nucleic acid, protein or carbohydrate content. An enlightening concept elaborated by Jonathan Kagan (Kagan 2023) recently suggest that PAMPs are released from microbes as a result of biochemical infidelities, or mistakes and failures that occur during infection. Rather than the whole microbes which would successfully complete invasion, it is these traces left behind by small percentage of failed infections that trigger immunity. Analogously, we could detect and identify intent in misconduct by the behavioral traces left behind by perpetrators.

7. Such ethical accountability on the part of authors is stipulated in authorship guidelines, such as those formulated by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) (https://www.icmje.org).

Additional information

Funding

There is no funding associated with this article.