New APS Ethics Guidelines Address Research Misconduct and Professional Responsibilities

Stunned by two recent high-profile cases of scientific misconduct by physicists, the American Physical Society council has adopted “updated and expanded” ethics guidelines that clarify the responsibilities of coauthors of scientific papers, urge a stronger emphasis on ethics education, and call for all research institutions to follow the Federal Policy on Research Misconduct. The new guidelines, developed by the ethics subcommittee of the APS panel on public affairs, are much more direct than the previous 1991 guidelines in addressing the issues of scientific misconduct and fraudulent research.

Development of the new guidelines was prompted by two investigations—one at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and the other at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—that determined two physicists, in unrelated cases, had misrepresented and fabricated data. The physicists, Victor Ninov of LBNL and Jan Hendrik Schön at Bell Labs, were dismissed for misconduct (see Physics Today, September 2002, page 15 , and November 2002, page 15 ).

APS President William Brinkman, a former Bell Labs executive, noted that many in the physics community “were a little innocent in our thinking in terms of fraud. We really, for a long time, assumed that that wasn’t going on.” Such innocence was reflected in the 1991 APS guidelines.

James Tsang, an IBM physicist who heads the public affairs panel, said the old guidelines “indicated a number of things that a physicist should do in the course of his or her professional life. You should hang on to your data, you should respond to inquiries from other scientists, and you should be responsible as a referee. But we were a membership organization and never thought we’d be in the position to enforce behavior, so we never said anything about what would happen if somebody transgressed on these norms.”

The new guidelines, approved on 10 November, come in several parts. A policy statement on how to handle allegations of research misconduct defines misconduct as “fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results. …” Such behavior is termed an “egregious departure from the expected norms of scientific conduct” that “can lead other scientists along fruitless paths.” It also “diminishes the vital trust that scientists have in each other,” and undermines public confidence in science. The statement goes on to say, “It is imperative … that the institutions responsible for the funding and performance of scientific research, as well as the relevant professional societies, take appropriate steps to discourage such conduct and have policies and procedures in place to deal with allegations of misconduct.”

Federal policy cited

The APS council cites the Federal Policy on Research Misconduct, created in December 2000, as “a cornerstone of efforts in the United States to maintain the integrity of the scientific literature.” The policy, which applies to federal agencies that fund research, “defines research misconduct, delineates responsibilities of the involved organizations and provides procedural guidelines for dealing with allegations of misconduct in federally funded research,” the APS statement noted.

Widespread implementation of the federal misconduct policy, a three-page document that can be found at http://www.ostp.gov/html/001207_3.html, would be “a significant advance in ensuring the proper treatment of allegations of research misconduct,” the council said. Even research institutions that don’t receive federal funds should develop policies consistent with the federal guidelines, the council noted.

The new APS Guidelines for Professional Conduct, described as “minimal standards of ethical behavior,” are fairly straightforward and note that “physicists have an individual and collective responsibility to ensure that there is no compromise with these guidelines.” Four basic areas are covered:

• ▸ Research results. Research results should be recorded and maintained in a form that allows analysis and review. The data should be immediately available to collaborators and, following publication, should be retained for a reasonable period so as to be available promptly and completely to responsible scientists. The fabrication or selective reporting of data with the intent to mislead is an “egregious departure from the expected norm.”

• ▸ Publication and authorship practices. Authorship “should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the concept, design, execution, or interpretation of the research study.” Individuals who have contributed to the study “should be acknowledged, but not identified as authors.” The guideline states that “plagiarism constitutes unethical scientific behavior and is never acceptable. Proper acknowledgement of the work of others used in a research project must always be given.”

• ▸ Peer review. Describing peer review as an “essential component of the scientific process,” this guideline states that, “although peer review can be difficult and time-consuming, scientists have an obligation to participate in the process.” Reviewers “should disclose conflicts of interest resulting from direct competitive, collaborative, or other relationships with any of the authors.” The guideline also states that “privileged information or ideas that are obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for competitive gain.”

• ▸ Conflict of interest. Although acknowledging that “many professional activities of physicists … have the potential for a conflict of interest,” this guideline recommends that “when objectivity and effectiveness cannot be maintained, the activity should be avoided or discontinued.” The guideline also states: “It should be recognized that honest error is an integral part of the scientific enterprise. It is not unethical to be wrong, provided that errors are promptly acknowledged and corrected when they are detected.”

Coauthor responsibility

One of the thorniest issues in developing the new guidelines was defining the responsibility of the coauthors on a research paper. Brinkman noted that the 1991 APS ethics guidelines and other similar guidelines don’t deal with the coauthor problem very effectively. “The National Academy of Sciences guideline said authors should delineate their roles in the footnotes, but nobody ever does that,” he said. Brinkman also pointed to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), a quasi-governmental German research funding agency, whose policy statement says, “Authors of scientific publications are always jointly responsible for their content.” That is not workable, Brinkman said, because scientists often contribute specific expertise to part of a project but are not involved in the detailed research.

The “great debate” the APS council had on the issue centered on an undergraduate or a junior scientist “far down the chain” in a research project, Brinkman said. A lower-level person who does a significant piece of research that contributes to a project should get listed as a coauthor, Brinkman said, “but is that person responsible for the total content of the paper? Most people’s view is, of course not.”

Tsang said the earlier APS guidelines had single-author papers in mind, whereas the new ones point out “that there are a number of different factors that need to be balanced in papers where there are coauthors. Every author doesn’t have to have a copy of every piece of data in the paper. But it is also true that it is not a good practice where every author only knows about their own result.”

Both Tsang and Brinkman said ethics issues must become more ingrained in new physicists, and the new guidelines include an education statement that says, “It is part of the responsibility of all scientists to ensure that all their students receive training which specifically addresses [professional ethics].”

“People are taking this seriously now, but I don’t know if that will be the case in five years,” Tsang said. “That’s why we’d like to see more attention paid to the education aspect.”