Research codes of conduct provide guidance in the conduct of research [1]. Such guidance ranges from generic advice to solid rules that are sanctioned and must be followed. While the researcher seems the obvious primary agent to take this responsibility, it can in fact also be carried by institutions, or collectively by research groups, and by national governments. Proper reporting, proper referencing in publications, and paying due respect to patients (in case of biomedical research) as research subjects might indeed arguably appear as clearly the responsibility of individuals. Yet, other things might appear more logically as concerns of institutions: providing infrastructure for data security, offering research integrity training, and installing ethics committees. But at closer look, we show, such attributions are not always as clear-cut. As this division is not trivial, we are interested in how the codes exactly differentiate between individuals and institutions: who or what exactly is being made responsible for realizing a specific value, or for warranting proper conduct of research?
This leads us to addressing the following two questions in this paper. First, what are the prominent values reflected in research codes? Second, to whom do codes attribute responsibility for the realization of those values: to the individual, to the institution, or to any other entity? We analysed fourteen institutional, national and international codes of conduct – predominantly in the field of biomedicine – to answer these two questions.
This paper will continue with brief introductions to the two conceptual pillars guiding our analysis: 1) the basic values that matter to (biomedical) scientific research, as reflected by research codes of conduct; and 2) the idea of attribution of responsibility for realising those values and distributing it between the individual and the institution. The method will be explained then, after which the results will be provided and analysed. Importantly, as we will demonstrate, the results provide reason to take an additional look at how notions of “culture” function in codes of conduct: something that sits inconveniently between the individual and the institution with respect to attributing responsibility.
The literature on responsible conduct of research (RCR) is concerned with research codes of conduct, amongst other concerns. Such codes are essentially normative: they express values that should be realized in research practices. In order to get a perspective on how responsibilities are assigned to either individual researchers or research institutions, we need to distinguish between different sorts of values, as they potentially come with different preferences for attributing responsibility.
1.1 Values in Research Practices
The values enshrined in research codes of conduct have emerged over time and serve different goods. From the literature, further discussed below, we discern four main clusters of values, each realating to one class of goods or “referent beneficiary”:
- values that somehow relate to truthfulness,
- values that capture the preservation of good scientific practice and responsibilities to colleagues,
- values that one needs to realise in order to be a good researcher oneself, and
- values that substantiate the responsibility scientists have towards society.
We will use these clusters as a means of organizing our investigation, as they potentially relate differently to the question of who is responsible for realising them.
The first cluster of values, related to truthfulness, often includes virtues such as methodological rigour, transparency [2], and fair peer review [2-4]. Also, more abstract values such as inquisitiveness [1, 5, 6], and integrity [7] are widely mentioned in this respect. This literature takes important inspiration from recent cases of fraud such as the Stapel case [8], or the Schön case [9]. In this literature, fraud is chiefly understood as falsification, fabrication and plagiarism (FFP) [10-12]. Much attention is paid to the avoidance thereof.
The second cluster of values has to do with how researchers relate to their colleagues. For one thing, fairness in treatment of authorship as well as attribution of earlier work, i.e. proper referencing, seems prominent [13]. Also good mentorship [4, 14] and the importance of good role models [6, 15] are mentioned in this context. These are to be seen as operationalisations of the recognition that the collective nature of science requires that individual members preserve that communal quality [16].
The third recurring theme is that researchers should make an effort to keep their research abilities up to date, so as to preserve the quality of their contribution to the field. This starts with getting the proper formal training before entering a field [17]. In a more abstract sense, this is also phrased as the need to preserve a good “character” [6, 18, 19]. This all is to recognize that most abilities, notably the generic ability to do good science, need training and practicing, and can easily succumb to compromising influences [20].
The last cluster of values relates to how scientific practice carries a broader societal responsibility. This is about permanently justifying the privileged position of science as a producer of truth, and comparably autonomous at that. Only if the members of scientific community are of indisputable integrity, will it be possible to maintain this position. In the specific case of biomedical research, this explicitly includes a responsibility towards patients, whether or not as research subjects. Here, influential work [19] has consisted of the formulation of four general principles: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. While the human research subject is an important subset of “society” towards which research has to act responsibly, we do not see a need in view of our research questions to further explore this distinction.
1.2 Attribution of Responsibility
The definitive property of a value is that it is something (arguably) desirable. This in itself leaves unspecified who is responsible for realising that value. At face value it may appear self-evident that it is the individual, professional researcher who is responsible for realising the values of responsible research, or at least for not compromising those values. However, there is in many cases no self-evident reason why realizing any given value is an individual responsibility. In many cases, it might just be as straightforward to argue that an institution – or more generally: the institutional landscape in which the researcher is embedded, which might extend beyond the institution strictly conceived, into associations and governments – is (partly, if not primarily) responsible for realizing it. Indeed, the RCR literature has broadend its focus by not only to arguing how a researcher should behave and what norms should be taken into account, but also to what the responsibility of institutions is regarding the facilitation of the conduct of research with integrity [9, 15, 21].
The reason to focus on attributions of responsibility is that they are indeed nontrivial, and at times even problematic. For example, it appears common-sensical that an individual researcher should show an innovative attitude towards novel research problems. However, the current competitive system has been shown to dissuade people from venturing into innovative research [22]. Hence, if we want researchers to be innovative, institutions carry some responsibility with respect to setting the right conditions. Similarly, publication bias – i.e. the tendency not to publish results of research if the results are “negative” in the sense that originally expected, positive, significant findings are not found [22, 23] – is generally agreed to be a bad thing and researchers should not let themselves be caught into it. But that requires that reward systems are arranged such that the publication of such negative results is equally attractive as the publication of positive results, which currently seems not the case. This means that not only research instutions, but also journal publishers carry a responsibility in this.
If it is not sufficiently specified who is responsible, all relations of accountability and responsibility become ambiguous as well. Consider for example a situation where transparency has not been exercised, where for the sake of argument we agree that it should have been so. In such a situation, both the institution and the individual researcher can in specific perspectives be seen as responsible for the mishap, and it depends on the broader picture who should be responsible for the lack of transparency. The researcher may indeed simply have neglected procedures for openness. But the institution in turn may have failed to provide and enforce relevant protocols and failed to provide the researcher with assistance in accomplishing transparency. The researcher and the institution each have specific possibilities and impossibilities to take part of this responsibility. Only if a code of conduct is sufficiently specific about who is responsible for what, will it be able to steer away from the pitfall of nobody being or feeling responsible; or perhaps worse, the situation that all responsibility is uncritically shifted onto the individual researcher.
1.3 Research question
When investigating research codes of conduct, we are specifically interested in whether and how responsibility is attributed and formulated. Are researchers made responsible for the things that they should indeed reasonably be held accountable for? And mutatis mutandis, does the same hold for institutions? Or are things sometimes attributed more ambiguously? And if they are, can we then identify a most logical place where it will end up in practice? That is to say: if attribution of responsibility is unclear, does it then typically end up on the plate of the individual researcher? Exactly the complexities just explained call for a critical examination of how responsibility is attributed in research codes.