Compliance Highlight: SIUE's Academic and Research Misconduct Policy
Posted January 6, 2021
Disciplines: All
Compliance Highlight: SIUE’s Academic and Research Misconduct Policy
This month, ORP is highlighting SIUE’s Academic and Research Misconduct Policy 1Q5, as well as resources available to help promote a culture of research integrity at all levels within the academic community. This week, our focus is on the definition of research and academic misconduct.
What is Academic or Research Misconduct under SIUE’s Policy?
Under SIUE’s policy, Academic and Research Misconduct includes but is not limited to:
- fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results;
- plagiarism, breach of confidentiality with respect to unpublished material, violation of accepted standards regarding submission and publication of scholarly works, and other misrepresentations of originality;
- failure to comply with research regulations or requirements, including, but not limited to, those applying to human subjects, laboratory animals, biohazardous agents, and standards of safety; or
4. any other conduct which seriously conflicts with accepted ethical standards in research and scholarship, including intentionally misleading or false reporting of credentials or other academically related information.
How are “Fabrication, Falsification, and Plagiarism” defined?
SIUE defines fabrication, falsification and plagiarism within the policy.
Fabrication means making up data or results and recording or reporting them. An example of fabrication would be a researcher who publishes a paper with made up portions of data claiming they were results of an experiment.
Falsification is manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes, or changing or omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the research record. Falsification in academics would be falsifying transcript records by changing the information, such as a grade or GPA. An example of falsification in research would be taking a graph from an experiment and changing the image to get a better result. This differs from fabrication since the data was not made up entirely -- an experiment was run and data was obtained -- but the data obtained was manipulated.
Plagiarism is the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit. Plagiarism can include failing to put a quotation in quotation marks, giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation, or reusing previously published data as new research results.
These definitions, along with others, can be found within the Academic and Research Misconduct policy. To see more examples of what is considered falsification, fabrication, or plagiarism, check out the NIH website on research integrity case studies.
What is NOT Academic or Research Misconduct
Misconduct involves acts of deception. SIUE’s Academic and Research Misconduct Policy does not apply to differences of opinion or interpretation, honest (unintentional or inadvertent) error, or authorship or collaboration disputes.
The National Institutes of Health Office of Intramural Research has a webpage devoted to resources and case studies that give more detail and explanation on research misconduct, including research misconduct versus honest difference of opinion.
SIUE Resources Available
SIUE publishes the Research and Academic Misconduct Policy (1Q5) on its website. Additionally, ORP has a research integrity webpage that includes definitions and links to other resources available. Some of those resources include the contact information for the SIU Ethics office, information on who you can talk to about making an allegation, and links to outside resources including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) webpage on “What is Research Integrity.”
Next week will focus on how someone can make an allegation and what happens after an allegation is made.
