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Universities have to fight research fraud

 

As a senior university lecturer, I am interested in ethics in the academy. I have previously blogged about the need for universities to diversify revenues to curb the decrease in government funding.

I have also argued the need for researchers to attract research funding as a means of developing their careers. I have also discussed the importance of publication for both graduate students and supervisors.

What is clear to our minds is the fact that scientific research generated at universities is beneficial to knowledge-based societies. But two questions linger in the minds of many people; does public funding accelerate knowledge creation? And are there cases of research fraud at universities?

To answer these questions we cast our eyes on the character of a university researcher. A grant-winning researcher is a motivated individual who publishes at least three peer-reviewed publications per year. These publications are quite influential as measured by the number of citations they receive later.

To incentivise the generation of novel ideas, the government through the National Research Fund (NRF) runs competitive calls for proposals annually. Such grant competitions are means of allocating public research funding to grantees whose proposals have a greater impact on the science community and the general public.

Research impact

Research shows that grant-winning researchers publish more articles in peer-reviewed journals as compared to grant-losers. This implies that public funding catalyses relevant research outputs and accessibility to the public.

 While publications, preprints and citations may give an impression of a good researcher, it is important to note that the three indicators give an incomplete picture of the research’s impact. It is vital to consider factors such as media coverage, citations in policy documents and discussion of research on social media as measures of research impact.

When researchers boast of the number of publications per year and social media visibility, you need to be reminded that research fraud has previously been detected in some of the publications coming from researchers.

It had not occurred to my mind that researchers can fabricate, falsify or deceive in performing or reporting research until I read articles about fraud incidents in universities posted online such as ‘10 Greatest Cases of Fraud in University Research’.

Dissemination of results

It is said that fraud can creep in at any level of research including research procedure, testing samples, interpretation and dissemination of results to achieve a particular position of the institution or funding organisation.

Research fraud may easily escape the public eye, but once detected, it puts the reputation of individual researchers, universities and funders at risk. A case of research fraud was that of Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel who admitted to faking data and making up entire experiments that were published widely.

There are so many Diederik Stapel’s around the world that have not been discovered. Going forward universities should develop proper mechanisms to detect and curb this dishonest behaviour.    BY DAILY NATION   

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