Professional Conduct and research milestones

Barts and The London

Joy Hinson

With thanks to Mike Watkinson & Caroline Wardle (S&E)

Today’s talk

• The School of Medicine and Dentistry

• The Doctoral College

• Your degree

• Scientific Integrity

• When things go wrong

About you….

• PhD or MDRes

• Full time or part time

• Home/EU or Overseas

Barts and The London SMD

Six Institutes

•Barts Cancer Institute

•Blizard

•Dentistry

•IHSE

•WHRI

•Wolfson

Academic Structure

Professor Joy HinsonDirector of Doctoral CollegeSMD

Professor Jon MayHSS

Professor Mike WatkinsonS&E

Directors of Graduate Studies

PhD Supervisory teams/Panels

Research Student and Postdoc- Networking -

• We want to encourage networking within and across department boundaries.

• School research open days, poster competitions, internal student organised conferences…..

What are we working towards?

Successful completion of your research degree

AND

Success in making the next step in your career

PhD Thesis

• The thesis must form a distinct contribution to knowledge of the subject and afford evidence of originality, shown by the discovery of new facts or by the exercise of independent critical power.

• Be of a standard to merit publication in whole or in part or in a revised form (for example, as a monograph or as a number of articles in learned journals).

• Be the work of the candidate

Milestones in your study (FT)

• 9 month report

• 18 month report

• 30 month report

• 39 months: submit thesis

Transferable skills training

What your School Expects from You

• Courteous and professional conduct towards all Staff and Students

• To be ambassadors for the School

• To contribute to the research standing of the School

• To complete your PhD in the agreed time period

What to Expect from your School

• We want you to succeed hence the monitoring process

• A pleasant and stimulating environment

• To encourage doctoral development training– to aid your employability

Transferable Skills from the PhD

• Technical research skills• Information searching skills• Turning your hand to a range of

technical and data analysis challenges• Project management skills• Presentation skills • Networking skills• Teaching/instruction of others• Working to schedules• Your career management

I can't believe it! Reading and writing actually paid off!

RESEARCH INTEGRITY/

SCIENTIFIC MISCONDUCT

Integrity of Science - as a Scientist

As a Scientist you:

• usually know what you ought to do when a moral question arises in research;

• probably don’t as a rule reflect on why a particular action is good or bad;

• realise that ignorance of an existing rule or law does not exempt you from the consequences if you break it;

• may face moral problems not anticipated by your discipline’s existing values, traditions and standards;

Integrity of Research - QM3. Integrity

3.1 Academic staff, research staff, visiting academics and research students should be honest in respect of their own actions in research and in their responses to the actions of other researchers. This applies to all research work, including experimental design, generating and analysing data, applying for funding, publishing results, recognising any real or potential conflicts of interest and acknowledging the direct and indirect contribution of colleagues, collaborators and any others involved in the research.

Reference: Queen Mary Guidelines on Good Practice in Research (2003).

QM’s definition of Scientific Misconduct

Piracy - the deliberate exploitation of ideas from others without proper acknowledgement; Plagiarism - the copying or misappropriation of ideas (or their expression), text, software or data (or some combination thereof) without permission and/or due acknowledgement; Mis-representation - deliberate attempt to represent falsely or unfairly the ideas or work of others, whether or not for personal gain or enhancement; Fraud - deliberate deception (which may or may not include the invention or fabrication of data).

Reference: QM Guidelines on Good Practice in Research (2003).

Evan has nearly finished his PhD. He has been working in collaboration with another PhD student and they have produced quite a lot of joint data. Can this data be used in Evan’s PhD thesis?

Case Study

Ellie’s supervisor sent her a manuscript to referee for a scientific journal. It was an interesting paper right in the area of Ellie’s research and described experiments that she hadn’t previously thought of doing. Ellie recommended that the manuscript was rejected and quickly set up the same experiments. Is this a problem? 

Case study

Case study

Peter was presenting a poster at a conference. Several people came up to discuss the poster with him and one person made some really useful suggestions about what he might do as a follow-up study. Would it be wrong for Peter to use this person’s ideas in his research?

Plagiarism

Presenting someone else’s work as one’s own irrespective of intention. Extensive quotations; close paraphrasing; copying from the work of another person, including another student or using the ideas of another person, without proper acknowledgement, also constitute plagiarism.

Reference: QM Academic Regulations 2009/10, Part 2 – General Regulation, §2.79.

Avoid plagiarism – use referencing• A reference is used whenever your work contains someone else’s words or

ideas.  A reference will ensure that the reader of the assignment can identify and locate the source of the information. 

• If you quote directly from another person’s work you must use quotation marks around the entire quote and reference the quote.

• If you paraphrase – put another person’s work into different words but with the same meaning – you must reference the work.

• If you use another person’s ideas, findings or research (i.e. facts they have established) in your work you must reference the work.

• ...

Reference: QM Academic Registry and Council Secretariat: Plagiarism – ten key points

Self-plagiarism

In writing, self-plagiarism occurs when authors re-use their own previously written work or data in a ‘new’ written product without letting the reader know that this material has appeared elsewhere. 

Reference: Miguel Roig (2006)

Copyright……..

Other Scientific Misconduct

QM’s definition of Scientific Misconduct

Piracy - the deliberate exploitation of ideas from others without proper acknowledgement; Plagiarism - the copying or misappropriation of ideas (or their expression), text, software or data (or some combination thereof) without permission and/or due acknowledgement; Mis-representation - deliberate attempt to represent falsely or unfairly the ideas or work of others, whether or not for personal gain or enhancement; Fraud - deliberate deception (which may or may not include the invention or fabrication of data).

Reference: QM Guidelines on Good Practice in Research (2003).

QM’s Handling of Allegations of Scientific Misconduct

2.88. Allegations of any of the following will be dealt with according to the Assessment Offences Regulations;

i.Breaches of any sections of the Academic Regulations relating to the conduct of assessment. ii.Plagiarism. iii.Fraudulent reporting of source material. iv.Fraudulent reporting of experimental results, research or other investigative work. v.The use, or attempted use, of ghost writing services for any part of assessment.

Reference: QM Academic Regulations 2010/11, Part 2, Assessment Offences Regulations .

Must you report scientific misconduct?

If you think you have seen a case of suspected research misconduct at QM, must you report it?

Reporting Scientific Misconduct

One of the most difficult situations that a researcher can encounter is to see or suspect that a colleague has violated the ethical standards of the research community. It is easy to find excuses to do nothing, but someone who has witnessed misconduct has an unmistakable obligation to act.

Reporting suspected research misconduct is a shared and serious responsibility of all members of the academic community. Any person who suspects a scientific misconduct has an obligation to report the allegation to a dean of the unit in which the suspected misconduct occurred or to another senior University administrator.

Reference: Gunsalus (1998)

You couldn’t make it up!

Hyung-In Moon, a South Korean plant compound researcher made up email addresses so he could do his own peer review.

35 papers now retracted as a result.

7 previous papers retracted several years ago for unspecified errors, some of which the notices called “major”.

http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/retraction-count-for-scientist-who-faked-emails-to-do-his-own-peer-review-grows-to-35/

Case study

In 2006 Professor Dalibor Sames retracted seven papers from American Chemical Society journals published with his PhD student Bengu Sezen. For six of these papers, Sames and Sezen were the only authors. Sames had already sacked five people from his group for not being able to reproduce Sezen’s work, but had secured tenure based on his published record. The University of Columbia subsequently retracted the PhD degree awarded to Sezen. She is now a PhD student in Heidelberg in molecular biology.

What questions does this case raise?

Reference: http://yclept.ucdavis.edu/course/280/SamesSezenCase.pdf

Food for Thought

“In the cases of scientific fraud that I have looked at, three motives, or risk factors have always been present. In all cases, the perpetrators:

1. were under career pressure;2. knew, or thought they knew what the answer

would turn out to be if they went to all the trouble of doing the work properly, and

3. were working in a field where individual experiments are not expected to be precisely reproducible.”

Reference: Goodstein, David (1996)

If things go wrong

• Talk with supervisor, or – School PhD tutor, or – School Director of Graduate Studies, or– School Research Administrator

• Don’t do NOTHING!

Maria started her PhD three months ago. It hasn’t turned out quite as she expected. Maria’s supervisor is very buy travelling to conferences and she rarely sees him. Although they had a meeting when Maria started and she thought she understood what she was meant to do, she hasn’t had a formal meeting since then and she feels completely lost. Nothing that she tries seems to work out and she feels that she is pursuing dead ends. Her project seems hopeless. She is dreading writing the 9 month report. What should Maria do?

Case study

Case Study Ian is working towards his PhD. His 9 month assessment went quite well but since then he hasn’t been working on his studies very much. Ian’s personal life is a bit of a mess and he hasn’t got enough time to do his research. His parents are divorcing and selling the house which means he will be homeless. His girlfriend wants to move in with him but Ian isn’t sure if that is a good idea. He spends a lot of time out with his friends and often doesn’t come into college. What should Ian’s supervisor do?

Do, or do not, there is no try.

Who to talk to

• Supervisor

• Second supervisor

• Director of Graduate Studies

• Head of Graduate School

…and finally

Studying for a PhD is a really exciting period in your life – ENJOY!

References - 1• Ahearne, John F, 1999. The Responsible Researcher: Paths and Pitfalls. North

Carolina: Sigma Xi, online at http://www.sigmaxi.org/programs/ethics/publications.shtml, accessed 20.09.2011.

• Bebau M., Pimple K., Muskavitch K., Borden S. & Smith D. (eds.), 1995. Moral Reasoning in Scientific Research: Cases for Teaching and Assessment, online at http://poynter.indiana.edu/mr/mr.pdf, accessed 20.09.2011.

• RCUK 2011. Policy and Code of Conduct on the Governance of Good Research Conduct, online at http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/funding/managing/Pages/goodpractice.aspx, accessed 20.09.2011.

• Goodstein, David, 1996. Conduct and Misconduct in Science in The Flight from Science and Reason, Paul R. Gross, et al., New York Academy of Sciences, reprinted in Ahearne, John F. ,1999. The Responsible Researcher: Paths and Pitfalls, Sigma Xi.

• National Academies, 2009. On Being A Scientist: A Guide to Responsible Conduct in Research, (3rd. Edition), Washington DC: National Academy Press, online at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/12192.html/

References - 2• QM Academic Regulations 2009/10, online at

http://www.arcs.qmul.ac.uk/policy_zone/academic/academic_regulations_2009_10.pdf, accessed 27.09.2011.

• QM Guidelines on Good Practice in Research (2003) online at http://www.qmul.ac.uk/qmul/research/policies/docs/g-gpr.pdf, accessed 20.09.2011.• QM Code of Practice for Research Degree Programmes (2011), online at

http://www.arcs.qmul.ac.uk/policy_zone/academic/Code_of_Practice_for%20Research_Degree_Programmes_2011-12.pdf, accessed 27.09.2011.

• QM Procedure for Investigating Allegations of Research Misconduct (2009) online at http://www.qmul.ac.uk/qmul/research/policies/docs/p-misconduct.pdf, accessed 20.09.2011.

• QM Research Ethics Committee, 2011, online at http://connect.qmul.ac.uk/research/ethicscommittee/index.html, accessed 20.09.2011.

• Roig, Michael, 2006. Avoiding plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and other questionable writing practices: A guide to ethical writing, online at http://facpub.stjohns.edu/~roigm/plagiarism/, accessed 27.09.2011.