Ten commandments of Scientific Research

We come across bad behavior of people in almost every other walks of life , almost every other day and that way are quite used to it. It is quite shocking to be alerted by bad behavior of scientists which is assuming alarming proportions. That is exactly what a study recently published in “nature”,the reputed international weekly journal of science does. To protect the integrity of science, we must look beyond falsification, fabrication and plagiarism, to a wider range of questionable research practices, argue Brian C. Martinson, Melissa S. Anderson and Raymond de Vries.(1)
The authors surveyed several thousand early and mid-career scientists, who are based in the United States and funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and asked them to report their own behaviors. Their findings revealed a range of questionable practices that are striking in their breadth and prevalence. This is the first time, the authors claim, such behaviors have been analyzed quantitatively. The evidence suggests that mundane 'regular' misbehaviour present greater threats to the scientific enterprise than those caused by high-profile misconduct cases such as fraud. It was in December 2000, the US Office of Science and Technology Policy defined research misconduct as "fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism (FFP) in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results". But the authors note that “The modern scientist faces intense competition, and is further burdened by difficult, sometimes unreasonable, regulatory, social, and managerial demands. This mix of pressures creates many possibilities for the compromise of scientific integrity that extend well beyond FFP.”

Fraud usually attracts attention of public at large. It being a high profile misconduct,is better looked after by other agencies like press and judiciary. Plagiarism is an act promoted by the facilities offered by internet search engines during last decade . At least internet itself provides means for reducing its incidence, if committed inadvertently or detect them using several web sources, another recent article by Priyanka.P.Doctor suggests ( 2), using forums like Findsame ( wwww.findsame.com) plagiarized.com ( www.plagiarized.com) and Turnitin ( www.turnitin.com). Fabrication and falsification refer to the integrity of the scientist or researcher and hence is a basic issue for which the scientific institutions themselves have to be responsible.

It is interesting to go through the top ten behaviors identified from the study by “nature”. They are falsifying or cooking research data, ignoring major aspects of human- subject requirements, not properly disclosing involvement in firms whose products are based on ones own research, relationship with students, research objects or clients that may be interpreted as questionable, using another’s ideas without obtaining permission or giving due credit, unauthorized use of confidential information in connection with ones own research, failing to present data that contradict one's own previous research, circumventing certain minor aspects of human- subject requirements, overlooking others use of flawed data or questionable interpretation of data, changing the design, methodology or results of a study in response to pressure from funding source . Though a few more undesirable behaviours got reported through the above study, let us hope that the “top ten” will form the basis of modern ten commandments of scientific research , if we are to foster a healthy scientific community.

References
1. Scientists behaving badly . Brian CM, Melissa SA, Raymond de Vries Nature 435, 737-738 (9 June 2005)
2. Doctor P. In Other words…Plagiarism in the new age . Asian Stud Med J
2003:2:2