13. Scientific integrity

Code of conduct

  1. Reliability

  2. Honesty

  3. Respect

  4. Accountability

Major violations

Honesty - deliberate violations

Fabrication - making up data

Plagiarism - copying other people’s work

Data falsification - not reporting certain findings, adjusting or misinterpreting data

File drawer problem - results that aren’t significant don’t make it into articles because journals want to publish interesting results

Confirmation bias - results that don’t correspond to expectations get ignored

Publication bias - only interesting things get published

Unjust removal of outliers - to get p-value down (removal only allowed if mistake was made)

p-hacking - conscious behav. of researchers

  • removing outliers to make results significant

  • add more participants to make results significant

  • run dif. analysis than planned

  • searching for sign. rel. in a dataset w. lots of variables (at least smth has to be significant there) - allowed only if presented as exploratory research

HARKing (Hypothesizing After Results are Knows) - in hindsight, formulating hypotheses ans pretending they were the main focus of research all along

Solutions

  1. Retraction - form of self correction afterwards

    • has drawbacks: reputation damage for researcher and science overall + often long time bet. publication and retraction

  2. Post Publication Peer Review (PPPR) - online discussion platform about publications

  3. Pre-registration - mandatory submission of research protocol before execution of actual research (hypotheses, methods, expectations) → publication independent of outcome

  4. Replication - as part of research cycle