Category Archives: Ethical research

Ethical use of student labor.

Posted on by

MommyProf wonders whether some of the goings on in her department are ethical. She presents two cases. I’m going to look at them in reverse order.

Case 2: Faculty member is tenure-track and he and I have collaborated on a paper. He was supposed to work on the literature, and sends me a literature review. It reads a little strangely to me, and I check the properties and find that it was actually written by an undergraduate in one of his classes. I write back to him and ask if that undergrad should be an author on the paper, since it would be a fairly major contribution, and he says yes, he forgot. This faculty member is assigned a graduate student each semester. This semester, the faculty member’s graduate student comes to me and said his work has included collecting and analyzing all the data and writing substantial portions of the lit review, but the student is not being credited on the final paper.

This case embodies a number of problems of which we have spoken before, at length.
Indeed, it bears some striking similarities to a case we considered a couple years ago. (In that case, an undergraduate research intern was helping an advanced graduate student in the research group to round up the relevant literature background for their research project … and the undergraduates summary of that relevant literature crept, word for word, into the graduate student’s dissertation.) Here’s what I wrote about that case:

Continue reading→

ClimateGate, the Michael Mann inquiry, and accepted scientific practices.

Posted on by

In my earlier post about the findings of the Penn State inquiry committee looking into allegations of research misconduct against Michael Mann, I mentioned that the one allegation that was found to merit further investigation may have broad implications for how the public understands what good scientific work looks like, and for how scientists themselves understand what good scientific work looks like.
Some of the commenters on that post seemed interested in discussing those implications. Others, not so much. As commenter Evan Harper notes:

It is clear that there are two discussions in parallel here; one is serious, thoughtful, and focused on the very real and very difficult questions at hand. The other is utterly inane, comprising vague ideological broadsides against nebulous AGW conspirators, many of which evince elementary misunderstandings about the underlying science.
If I wanted to read the second kind of conversation, there are a million blogs out there with which I could torture myself. But I want to read – and perhaps participate in – the first kind of conversation. Here and now, I cannot do that, because the second conversation is drowning out the first.
Were that comment moderators could crack down on these poisonous nonsense-peddlers. Their right to swing their (ham)fists ends where our noses begin

Ask and you shall receive.

Continue reading→

In the wake of ClimateGate: findings of the misconduct inquiry against Michael Mann.

Posted on by

Remember “ClimateGate”, that well-publicized storm of controversy that erupted when numerous email messages from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) webserver at the University of East Anglia were stolen by hackers and widely distributed? One of the events set in motion by ClimateGate was a formal inquiry concerning allegations of research conduct against Dr. Michael E. Mann, a professor in the Department of Meteorology at The Pennsylvania State University.
The report (PDF) from that inquiry has been released, so we’re going to have a look at it here.
This report contains a lot of discussion of how the committee pursuing the inquiry was constituted, and of which university policies govern how the committee is constituted, and of how membership of the committee was updated when members left the university for other positions, etc. I’m going to gloss over those details, but they’re all there in the ten page report if you’re interested in that kind of thing.
My focus here will be on what set the inquiry in motion to begin with, on the specific allegations they considered against Dr. Mann, on how the committee gathered information relevant to the allegations, and on the findings and decisions at which they arrived. Let me state up front that committee decided that one allegation merited further consideration in an “investigation” (which is the stage of the process that follows upon an “inquiry”), and that to my eye, that investigation may end up having broader implications for the practice of science in academia.
But let’s start at the beginning. From the inquiry report:

Continue reading→

Some thoughts on ClimateGate.

Posted on by

It’s quite likely, if you’re reading anything else on the internets besides this blog for the past few weeks, that you’ve already gotten your fill of ClimateGate. But maybe you’ve been stuck in your Cave of Grading and missed the news that a bunch of emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) webserver at the University of East Anglia were stolen by hackers (or leaked by an insider, depending on who’s telling the story) and widely distributed. Or maybe you’re still sorting out what you think about the email messages in question and what they mean for their authors, the soundness of scientific consensus on climate change, or the responsible conduct of science more broadly.
Honestly, I’m still sorting out what I think, but here’s where I am at the moment:

Continue reading→

How did we do at dialogue?

Posted on by

In a recent post, I issued an invitation:

I am always up for a dialogue on the issue of our moral relation to animals and on the ethical use of animals in scientific research. If folks inclined towards the animal rights stance want to engage in a dialogue right here, in the comments on this post, I am happy to host it.
(I will not, however, be hosting a debate. A dialogue is different from a debate, and a dialogue is what I’m prepared to host.)

That post has received upward of 250 comments, so there was certainly some sort of exchange going on. But, did we manage to have something approaching a dialogue, or did we end up slipping into a debate?
In considering this question, I want to offer a grid I encountered in the Difficult Dialogues Initiative at San Jose State University, adapted from material from the Public Conversations Project. The grid compares characteristics of dialogues and arguments (which are not precisely the same as debates but are probably close enough for our purposes here):

Continue reading→

When collaboration ends badly.

Posted on by

Back before I was sucked into the vortex of paper-grading, an eagle-eyed Mattababy pointed me to a very interesting post by astronomer Mike Brown. Brown details his efforts to collaborate with another team of scientists who were working on the same scientific question he was working on, what became of that attempted collaboration, and the bad feelings that followed when Brown and the other scientists ended up publishing separate papers on the question.
Here’s how Brown lays it out:

Continue reading→

Signing a public petition means taking a public stand.

Posted on by

This, in turn, means that members of the public who strongly disagree with your stand may decide to track you down and let you know they disagree with you.
Apparently, this may become an issue for those who signed the Pro-Test petition in support of ethical and human scientific research with animals. From an email sent to signatories:

[A] few websites hosted by animal rights activists have encouraged their readerships to visit the list of Pro-Test signatories in order to find names and to contact those persons to express their opposition to animal research. While your email addresses on the RaisingVoices.net website are secure and not publicly listed, the animal rights groups encourage people to use the wide array of Internet tools to find contact information and to use it.
While we regret that any person may receive negative communications as a result of this heinous effort by animal rights groups, we want to express – more than ever – our resolve that circumstances such as this are exactly why we all signed the Pro-Test Petition to begin with. Harassment of scientists and supporters of research is intolerable and only resoluteness and mutual support can overcome it.
Remember — no one on this list stands alone. We all share the support and assistance of more than 10,000 other signatories, as well as the resources of Americans for Medical Progress, Speaking of Research and Pro-Test for Science. Now more than ever, it is crucial that we find our collective voices and refuse to shy away when extremists use their predictable, tired tricks.

In case you were wondering, here’s the language from one of the ARA sites:

Continue reading→

Does a retraction constitute defamation of your coauthor?

Posted on by

I’m used to reading about cases of alleged scientific misconduct in science-focused publications and in major media outlets like the New York Times and the Boston Globe. I’ve had less occasion to read about them in law journals. But today, on the front page of the New York Law Journal, there’s an article titled “Scientists Defamation Claims Over Colleagues Efforts to Discredit Her Research Are Dismissed”. (The article is available to paid subscribers. This may be a good time to make a friend with access to a law library.)
The legal action the article describes was brought by a scientist who argued she was being defamed by a collaborator who no longer stands behind work they jointly published. The defendant says the published results are not reproducible; the plaintiff says, stop defaming me!
The judge says, your case doesn’t meet the burden to prove defamation.
From the article:

Continue reading→