Research integrity requires academia to seek truth from facts and adhere to scientific principles and fair norms. Photo: FILE

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A forum on research integrity was recently held at Peking University. Scholars discussed the moral problems facing today’s academia and tried to find a solution.

Globally, research integrity is defined as pursuit for truth and adherence to humanitarianism in the conduct of science. It also deals with public accountability and social responsibility, said Yuan Junpeng, director of the Research Center for Knowledge and Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ National Science Library. In countries like the United States, academic misconduct refers to forgery, tampering and plagiarism. For other countries, it also includes destruction of research records, repeated publication, mishandling of conflicts of interest, provision of false information in project applications and misuse of project funds, Yan added.

In short, research integrity requires academia to seek truth from facts and adhere to scientific principles and fair norms, said Wang Jimin, deputy director of the Department of Information Management at Peking University.

In recent years, the number of retracted papers across the world has increased drastically, Yuan said. For example, Web of Science (WoS), a research database of worldwide high-impact journals, has delisted a total of 6,183 articles between 1989 and June 2018. In terms of first author’s nationality, China ranks first with 1,102 retracted papers, accounting for the largest proportion at 15.7 percent, followed by the United States with 1,093 retracted articles. Other leading countries include Japan, India and Germany, whose proportions range from 6.8 percent to 3.5 percent. China surpassed the United States because a soaring number of its theses were delisted from the website in 2015 and 2016.

Thesis retraction is a self-corrective mechanism for the scientific community to maintain research ethics. The aforementioned data has shown that the scale of retraction is positively related to the number of publications. It is common to see that global journals delist many papers from the United States, Japan, India, Germany and the Republic of Korea, Yuan said.

The decline in research integrity is rooted in the malfunctional academic mechanism. When the academic system creates an environment where bad money drives out good money, people devoted to knowledge can no longer receive awards, get promotions or obtain the treatment they deserve. Thus, research integrity faces problems, Wang said.

The existing measures targeting research integrity fall short when it comes to feasibility. China’s management system for scientific credibility has formed a range of regulatory mechanisms. But the concrete implementations are not yet mature and most formulations lack operability. Also, most scholars propose theories while failing to apply them towards establishing a unified and feasible credibility evaluation system.

Wang pointed out that universities rarely open courses to educate academic norms, the lack of which also contributes to the frequent cases of research misconduct. Plus, scholarly criticism is not highly valued by the research community and by academic management departments. For example, many forms of criticism, such as book reviews, have transmogrified into a barter system for scholars to praise each other or brag about themselves. Academic norms have been thusly eroded or destroyed.

Absent research integrity can be restored through education and practice. To combat the worsening situation, universities should arrange courses on how to master academic norms, Wang suggested. Wu Haiyan, deputy director of the Department of Social Sciences from Tsinghua University, agreed with Wang, adding that researchers need a free academic environment so that they won’t commit misconduct just in order to catch up with research schedules. “In Tsinghua University, we train all young teachers after recruiting them and do our part to eliminate academic dishonesty,” Wu said.

Wang called upon scholarly organizations and regulatory departments to set up publishing mechanisms in response to irregular academic behaviors. They should clarify details such as violation identification and punishment methods. Without such mechanisms, the vision of reshaping academic norms is merely an illusion. Fundamental reforms to academic evaluation are urgently needed. The measurement used to be done by listing researchers’ academic publications and rating the journals and publishing houses, but their scholarly opinions, methodologies and contributions to the discipline also deserve review. Improved mechanisms will streamline academic norms if they can also be implemented in thesis defense, academic title promotion and scholarly award evaluation.

 
This article was translated from  Guangming Daily.

(edited by MA YUHONG)