RCR Training
At the undergraduate and graduate level, this is a great resource: On Being a Scientist : a guide to Responsible Conduct in Research published by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine_._ We have created a PowerPoint presentation with case studies that are adapted for middle school and high school students in the All About Arsenic project.
Students might be interested (and shocked) to read about real cases of research misconduct.
An August 2018 article in Science Magazine called Tide of Lies recounts the efforts of researchers to expose the falsification of data by Yoshihiro Sato, a Japanese researcher who had conducted numerous clinical trials to reduce the risk of hip fractures. Because of his false reports, subsequent meta-analyses came to wrong conclusions, clinical trials with thousands of patients were conducted unnecessarily, and new medical guidelines were set that were based on lies. And yet it was an arduous task for some researchers to get the false studies retracted.
Encourage students to do some searching online. They could start with the Ten Greatest Cases of Fraud in University Research.
Here are some questions for students to consider:
- What are some solutions to the problem of research fraud? Specifically, reference one or more of the three types of research misconduct: fabrication of data, falsification of data, and/or plagiarism.
- How can we, as scientists, regain the public trust?
Share this with your students: “Communicating Data” Responsible Conduct of Research Training Presentation