Nature and causes of questionable research practice and research misconduct from a philosophy of science perspective

ABSTRACT

Misconduct in science is often viewed and analyzed through the lenses of normative ethics and moral philosophy. However, notions and methods in the philosophy of science could also provide rather penetrative explanatory insights into the nature and causes of scientific misconduct. A brief illustration in this regard, using as examples the widely popular Popperian falsification and the Kuhnian scientific paradigm, is provided. In multiple areas of scientific research, failure to seek falsification in a Popperian manner constitutes a questionable research practice and could lead to “falsification” in the context of research misconduct. On the other hand, scientific misconduct is often facilitated by its perpetrators using the familiarity, expectations and confines of a Kuhnian paradigm to blend in fabricated data/results. A rudimentary application of these philosophical notions could be useful in our understanding of the nature and cause of research misconduct, and facilitate mitigation of the latter through educational means.

KEYWORDS:

• Research misconduct
• questionable research practice
• responsible conduct in research
• philosophy of science
• Thomas Kuhn
• Karl Popper

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ France, for example, would soon require Ph.D. recipients to take an integrity oath on the day they successfully defend their thesis (https://www.science.org/content/article/france-will-require-ph-d-s-take-research-ethics-oath).

² The World Conference on Research Integrity’s Singapore Statement on Research Integrity in 2010 (https://wcrif.org/guidance/singapore-statement) included four principles (honesty, accountability, professionalism, and stewardship). The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (https://allea.org/code-of-conduct) also has four principles of good research practice (reliability, honesty, respect and accountability). The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants and funding information cited four shared values in scientific research (honesty, accuracy, efficiency and objectivity) (https://grants.nih.gov/policy/research_integrity/what-is.htm).

³ Logical positivists also realized that the verifiability criterion is deemed to be too stringent, and as such could undermine itself, as most of not all universal generalizations are empirically unverifiable.

⁴ Popperian falsification, of such fundamental importance to defining science as it is, fails as a demarcation criterion in the light of the Duhem-Quine thesis/problem, which posits that unambiguous scientific falsifications are impossible because a hypothesis is accompanied by auxiliary assumptions, such that its true/false status would be underdetermined during a process of falsification.

⁵ Allegations of misconduct on the part of Millikan is implied in Broard and Wade’s popular science book Betrayers of the Truth (Broad & Wade, 1982). A more recent appraisal by Niaz concluded that if Millikan’s handling of data is to be understood with no reference to his presuppositions, then “ … some degree of ‘misconduct’ can be perceived” (Niaz, 2005), but Millikan has his defenders. The central issue of the controversy is that Millikan had stated in his 1913 paper in Physical Review that 58 oil droplets used in the analysis “ … is not a selected group of drops but represents all of the drops experimented upon during 60 consecutive days … ” (Milikan 1913) (p. 138). This is not true, as Milikan’s lab notebooks showed a much higher number of observed droplets (even counting from the date of the first of these observed droplets, there are still 49 excluded droplets). More technical analyses of Millikan’s data, notably by Allan Franklin (A. D. Franklin, 1981; A. Franklin, 1984), suggest that Millikan was not so much bothered with the fractional charge issue (which he deemed settled in his previous work), but rather wished to get at the value of the elementary charge “e.” Including the omitted data will not significantly change Millikan’s reported value of e, but will result in a larger statistical deviation from the mean. Franklin did note one particular droplet that has good recordings but was excluded with no technical reason except for a notebook remark of “won’t work” as the value derived from this droplet would have deviated significantly from Millikan’s expected value of e. This is explained by Franklin as the droplet having accumulated a large amount of charge, which would affect its movement. Jennings has also argued that Millikan was not intentionally misleading, and that it is unlikely that he had misled the scientific community (Jennings, 2004).

⁶ The Merriam-Webster dictionary’s definition for “paradigm:” a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/paradigm).

⁷ As stated by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), paper mills are profit oriented, unofficial and potentially illegal organizations that produce and sell fraudulent manuscripts that seem to resemble genuine research. They may also handle the administration of submitting the article to journals for review and sell authorship to researchers once the article is accepted for publication (https://publicationethics.org/systematic-manipulation-paper-mills).