Trustworthy Research-Editorial Introduction
Author(s):
Caroline Whitbeck
For several decades ending in the early 1980s, the subject
of research integrity received little sustained attention
within the research community. That a researcher would commit
a major breach of trust seemed almost unthinkable. The
literature on the subject was minuscule. Although the
American Association for the Advancement of Science did form
its Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility, the
report that John Edsall wrote for this committee in 1975
stood virtually alone as a statement on research ethics.1 Although he and a
few other stalwarts had been raising a variety of ethical
issues since the 1950s, their efforts did not immediately
lead others to take up the subject. Rosemary Chalk's valuable
collection, Science, Technology and Society: Papers
from SCIENCE, 1949-1988.2 shows the surprising neglect of research
conduct in those forty years, especially prior to 1980.
Research conduct is barely mentioned except in the section on
research misconduct, and that section is a mere six pages
long and contains nothing written before 1981.
Many researchers, of course, maintained high ethical
standards for themselves and took great care to pass these
ideals on to their students. 3 Nonetheless, the larger community of research
scientists formulated few statements of ethical norms for
their work. Despite two articles in Science that
argued the need for an ethical code for scientists, 4 little was done by
professional societies to address the need for guidelines for
research conduct until the mid-1980s or later. For example,
it was not until 1991 that the American Physical Society
issued their first statement of ethical guidelines,5 (and those guidelines
dealt exclusively with matters of research ethics.)
In contrast, most engineering societies and at least one
scientific society, the American Chemical Society (ACS),
issued codes and guidelines for professional responsibility
for a half century and more. 6 Those statements had set forth norms of
professional responsibility for public health and safety.
Health care professionals such as nurses, physicians, and
physical therapists had all established ethical norms for
practice and to varying degrees educated new practitioners
about their responsibilities.
Only now is the larger research community actively
developing a basic vocabulary with which to discuss the
ethical aspects of research conduct. The legacy of silence is
very apparent to those of us who have been attempting to
develop the conversation on research integrity. In
discussions at a variety of universities and institutions, I
have often found that researchers are surprised to learn,
presumably for the first time, just what their colleagues
think and do. In his paper for this journal, Professor Edsall
discusses several instances in which astute researchers have
been at a loss for what to do when confronted with misconduct
and have responded in odd ways, such as refusing to let
perpetrators of fabrication or falsification participate in
retracting their papers. The absence of norms for coping with
such breaches of trust was symptomatic of the neglect of
research ethics in the decades leading to the 1980s. During
this period, hardly any universities or other research
institutions established policies for investigating charges
of wrongdoing. Flagrant or repeated instances of plagiarism
or of fabrication or falsification of data or experiments
were either ignored or mishandled. 7
Recognition of the gross mishandling of cases like those
Professor Edsall describes came in the 1980s, when the
government began mandating procedures for handling charges of
serious wrongdoing. This second period of discussion ran into
the 1990s. The attention to serious wrongdoing, commonly
called "research misconduct" was much needed, but
unfortunately, the discussion quickly became polarized.
Some said that research was riddled with "fraud." Others
countered that the charges of fraud in science were
exaggerated and that the attention to research misconduct was
part of a campaign to discredit science and drastically
reduce public support for it. About all that could be
generally agreed on was that institutions needed better ways
to handle charges of wrongdoing. Better ways of handling such
charges were certainly needed, for many reasons, not the
least of which was to create a process that is fair, protects
innocent parties, and is likely to bring the truth to
light.
This second period extended into the early 1990s. Although
a few institutions did establish guidelines for the conduct
of research in this period, legalism so dominated the
discussion of research conduct that ethical concerns were
often distorted. Emphasis fell on legal and quasi-legal
procedures for handling allegations of fabrication,
falsification, and plagiarism. Those raising subtler issues
of trust and trustworthiness were largely ignored, and many
otherwise sensible people forgot what they knew about ethics.
For example, some people with a generally good command of
English claimed that we do not have a definition of
plagiarism. Plagiarism has a clear definition, of
course; it is the representation of another's work or ideas
as one's own. All that is wanting is a specification of the
evidentiary standards to be used in legal or quasi-legal
proceedings. Others immediately took the raising of any
ethical questions in research to raise questions of "fraud."
The assumption that the only ethical issue worth discussing
are matters of fraud, or at least serious misconduct has been
quite persistent during the past decade. This persistence was
brought home again recently when in 1994 I was part of a
working group developing guidelines for a professional
society on certain aspects of research conduct. A renowned
scientist who was part of the group objected to the use of
the word "ethics" in part of our deliberations on the grounds
that our subject matter was not fraud, as though fraud were
the only ethical issue.
Because legalism so dominated the discussion in this
second period, even observations about the relationship of
instances of outright misconduct to other ethical aspects of
a situation were often ignored. Foremost among these was that
falsification, fabrication and plagiarism tend to occur in
research environments where a host of other offenses,
disputes and dereliction of duties-poor mentoring ,
harassment, disagreements about authorship and ownership of
data or failure to share data-have gone unresolved.8 Fabrication,
falsification and plagiarism occupied the center stage,
alone.
We have recently entered a third period in which the
vocabulary for research integrity has expanded to include
"trust," and "trustworthiness." Although the question of
ethical behavior in research arose in the last century as
well, 9in those
days research was often a solitary endeavor. The complexity
of today's research enterprise has created such a vast
network of cooperative endeavors that trust relationships
have a new importance. Trust introduces a simplicity that is
necessary for such cooperative endeavors: it endows certain
expectations with assurance. 10 To consider all the possible
disappointments, defections, and betrayals by those on whom
we rely, all the possible consequences of those failings, and
all the preventive measures we could devise takes too much
time and energy. Trust reduces this burden.
What ensures that researchers are not merely trusted but
trustworthy? The philosophical inquiries of Bernard Williams
and of Annette Baier contribute to our understanding of this
question. Williams argues that the search for abstract
solutions is vain and directs attention back to the question
of how specific people in specific circumstances can be
motivated to be trustworthy. 11 Baier has illuminated many of the features
of trust and gone further to inquire into criteria for the
moral soundness of trust.
The concept of trust entails both confidence and reliance.
As Baier points out, we may have confidence in events,
people, or circumstances, or at least in our beliefs and
predictions about them, but if we do not in some way rely on
them, our confidence alone does not amount to trust. 12 Our reliance is a
source of risk, and risk differentiates trusting in something
from merely being confident about it. If we are in full
control of an outcome or otherwise immune from
disappointment, we have no need to take the risk of trusting
others. We may, of course, continue to rely on other people
or on circumstances simply because we lack other options. We
are fortunate if we need to be reliant only when we have a
good basis for confidence.
Baier has broken new ground in examining when, ethically
speaking, one ought to trust. She illuminates the strong
relationship that trust has to truth, and offers as a test of
the moral soundness of trust relationships, that they thrive
rather than wither when the basis for confidence is revealed.
Trust relationships fail this test when, for example, one
party feigns trustworthiness or behaves reliably only because
the other party dominates. Baier draws attention to the
ethical mistake of putting the preservation of dependable
behavior ahead of concern for its morality.
Recent work on the interplay between trust and truth in
the history of science complements this work in philosophical
ethics. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's Leviathan
and the Air Pump, Shapin's A Social History of
Truth, and Gerald Holton's "On Doing One's Damnedest:
The Evolution of Trust in Scientific Findings" all argue that
assessments of truth in science have turned on the
credibility of people. 13 Shapin and Schaffer's social histories emphasize
how the civility of the English aristocracy undergirded the
legitimacy that social authority conferred on seventeenth
century scientific discourse. In this period, a report of
findings was in large measure credible to the scientific
community because of the social standing of the observer. A
scientist's claims gained credence first on the basis of his
credibility as a gentleman, one whose honor, whose very
identity, was founded on his good name. At the same time
devotion to the pursuit of truth required a willingness to
break the customary rules of civility by contradicting even
those of higher rank.
The work of Holton and of Shapin illuminate the process by
which trust necessary for research was established and
extended in the physical sciences. Trust in the veracity of
certain people and their testimony was established first, and
then on the basis of that trust in people, a system of review
was set up by the scientific community to establish the
trustworthiness of findings. Holton traces the increasing
complexity of cooperation, and hence of trust, among
physicists in the first half of the twentieth century and
draws attention to the development of trust in each other's
research findings that arose from this experience of
successful cooperation.
The picture that both Holton and Shapin give us of trust
in results stemming from a prior trust in people is in marked
contrast to the unreflective assumption that quite apart from
the trustworthiness of people, the mechanisms of science will
ensure the trustworthiness of results.
Shapin concludes that "The very power of science to hold
knowledge as collective property and focus doubt on bits of
currently accepted knowledge is founded upon a degree and a
quality of trust that, arguably, is unparalleled elsewhere in
our culture." 14
He holds that researchers have long engaged in arguing
vociferously over facts and theories, but those debates
largely assumed that those engaged in the debate are all
credible-that is, honorable. The skepticism that is familiar
to researchers as an established part of scientific review is
directed toward exposing mistakes, but not wrong-doing.
It is, therefore, not surprising that in the period prior
to 1980, researchers thought about one another's
trustworthiness only when their trust was disappointed or
betrayed. With little experience in discussing research
ethics, researchers lacked a basis for agreeing about
appropriate criteria for establishing trust, about the
seriousness of particular betrayals of trust, and what they
could do to prevent or limit betrayal in the future. It is
not altogether surprising that when it became clear that the
ethical aspects of research conduct had been neglected,
attention focused first on the most flagrant acts of
wrongdoing. The subtler and more complex questions of
trustworthiness have only very recently received attention
and discussion in the research community. 15
The topic of this issue of Science and Engineering
Ethics takes recognition of the importance of
questions of trust and trustworthiness as its point of
departure. The present situation is one in which many
researchers have experienced some disillusionment or
betrayal. Reestablishing trust is difficult. To ask for some
basis for believing that the same disappointments will not
recur is only reasonable. Without new grounds for assurance,
the attempt to rekindle one's previous uncritical, naive, or
unconscious trust is simply denial. 16 To reestablish trust on a sound
basis requires understanding the betrayal or defection and
its causes, and then having good reason to believe that the
causes have been eliminated or brought under control.
The papers in this issue illuminate the present situation
in scientific research and the events that led up to it. They
richly illustrate ethical and methodological distinctions
that are important for understanding the norms and practices
in research today, where deficiencies exist in those norms
and practices, and practical possibilities for strengthening
or reestablishing the well-founded and morally sound trust
that research requires.
John Edsall, arguably the scientist who has provided the
most sustained moral leadership on questions of research
ethics in recent decades, has authored the first paper,
On the Hazards of Whistleblowers and on Some Problems
of Young Biomedical Scientists in Our Time. He first
discusses responses to evidence of misconduct from the 1960s
to the present, reflecting how the general unpreparedness of
the scientific community to come to grips with research
misconduct (or other unwelcome events) frequently led to ill
treatment of the person who first raised the issue. The cases
of misconduct he considers are primarily those involving the
fabrication or falsification of data or experiments. Edsall
then goes on to consider conditions that today create greater
pressure to distort experimental findings, at least for
researchers in certain fields. His candid and insightful
account of cases-several of which he witnessed at close
range-emphasize two observations: first, the great danger to
those who report misconduct when the research community is
unprepared to accept such reports, and second, the difficulty
that astute researchers have had in coming to terms with
wrongdoing in research. 17 In his comments on John Edsall's paper Sheldon
Krimsky both illuminates the moral leadership that Professor
Edsall has demonstrated and expands upon the hazards to
complainants. Leon Trilling, in his comments to John Edsall's
paper expands upon the character of pressures on today's
researchers.
"How Are Scientific Corrections Made?" by Nelson Kiang,
like John Edsall's contribution, draws on the author's
extensive personal experience, both as a researcher and as
someone who has helped universities and government agencies
review charges of misconduct. Like Edsall, Kiang, too,
focuses on trust and trustworthiness of experimental results,
although he also mentions instances of misappropriation of
ideas or data. Kiang exposes the simplistic nature of the
belief that science provides mechanisms that readily correct
mistakes in primary data collections, and clarifies several
types of mistake and moral failing that lead to unreliable
results. He draws attention to common practices that
encourage untrustworthy conduct, including journal practices
that discourage correction and, therefore, implicitly
encourage researchers to attempt a lucky guess.
Kiang also suggests practical controls for limiting abuses
and self-deception.
In his comments on "How Are Scientific Corrections Made?"
Robert Guertin, drawing on examples from his own field of
experimental physics, discusses factors that make replication
of results practically impossible or at least very difficult.
In contrast to Shapin's account of the historical separation
of skepticism about results from skepticism about a
researcher's ethics, Guertin suggests that today healthy
skepticism about results stems in part from the expectation
that certain ethical as well as methodological standards are
often breached.
In "Policies and Perspectives on Authorship," Mary Rose
and Karla Fischer take up the second major topic in research
ethics, fair credit. They explore norms and perspectives on
questions of authorship and credit. They draw on cases and
previous empirical studies (and outline a study of their own)
to illuminate both questions of expectations (trust)
regarding credit, and questions of what credit is deserved or
earned (fairness and trustworthiness). They discuss gift
authorship, plagiarism and the subtler abuses in assignment
of credit. Rose and Fischer also examine guidelines and
policies on authorship and credit and means of enforcement of
these norms in preventing misunderstandings and abuses.
"Trust and the Collection, Selection, Analysis and
Interpretation of Data: A Scientist's View," by Stephanie J.
Bird and David E. Housman returns to the topic of the
integrity of research findings but considers more common
situations, rather than those in which there is evidence of
misconduct. Their paper brings out the multi-layered trust
relationships that undergird scientific research and the
complex and difficult judgments that a researcher must make
about data and its interpretation.
Eleanor G. Shore in "Effectiveness of Research Guidelines
in the Prevention of Scientific Misconduct" examines the role
of institutional guidelines on research practice in
establishing consistent standards and educating researchers.
The guidelines that Shore discusses are not expected to
prevent all research misconduct, but rather to improve the
conduct of research, generally, and lessen the incidence of
lesser but common ethical lapses due to a single-minded
concern for expediency. The Ombudsman for Research
Practice: A Proposal for a New Position and an Invitation to
Comment, by Ruth Fischbach and Diane Gilbert explores
the possibilities for another institutional support for
conscientious research practice; one that might be especially
helpful to students and trainees, who are the most vulnerable
to reprisal when charges of wrongdoing arise. In Truth and Trustworthiness
in Research, I provide an overview of
considerations of trust and trustworthiness and the relation
of truth to trustworthiness. I draw on examples of recent
breaches of standards of research conduct to argue that
"fraud" in the strict sense is a tiny proportion of
misconduct cases. Reckless research practice is a more common
betrayal of trust. Furthermore, I argue that intentional
deception need not be a more serious betrayal of trust than
negligent or recklessness violations of standards. Finally I
examine the question of the moral soundness of trust
relationships among researchers focusing on the
supervisor-supervisee relationship. Tyson Browning's
contribution to the Educational Forum: "Reaching for the 'Low
Hanging Fruit': The Pressure for Results in Scientific
Research-A Graduate Student's Perspective" exemplifies how
graduate students may conduct their own examinations of what
they experience as ethically significant problems, and
develop their ability to raise issues, discover norms, learn
from experienced practitioners and find resolutions. The
specific problem he explores is that of coping with pressure
from research sponsors for results that the researcher may
see as quite preliminary. He discovers in his interviews the
importance of establishing mutual expectations with research
sponsors in order to meet other professional
responsibilities, including the responsibility to advance
knowledge in one's field. The goal of this issue is to
advance the conversation about the ethics of research
practices, to supply important distinctions illustrated with
cases and examples drawn form actual practice. In so doing
the papers in this issue draw attention to the
interconnections among the ethical issues and to possible
means for strengthening the morally sound and well-founded
trust on which the research enterprise depends.
I thank Alfred I. Tauber, Director of the Boston University Center
for Philosophy and History of Science and Nelson Y.S. Kiang
of MIT, Harvard, the Massachusetts General Hospital and the
Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, for their invaluable
intellectual and practical guidance that led to the
symposium on Trustworthy Research at the Boston Colloquium
for the Philosophy of Science in November 1994, for which
the papers in this issue were first prepared. I am further
indebted to Fred Tauber for his many astute comments at the
symposium itself and to him, Nelson Kiang and Stephanie
Bird for their comments on this editorial.
Caroline Whitbeck
Science and Engineering Ethics, 1:4.
October 1995, 322-328.
Caroline Whitbeck
Science and Engineering Ethics
1
.4
(October 1995):
322-28