Critical evaluation of the guidelines of the Finnish Advisory Board on Research Integrity and of their application

Abstract

We have national guidelines for the responsible conduct of research (RCR) and procedures for handling allegations of misconduct in Finland. The guidelines have been formulated and updated by the Finnish Advisory Board on Research Integrity (TENK). In this article, we introduce and evaluate the national RCR guidelines. We also present statistics of alleged and proven RCR violation cases and frequency of appeals to TENK on the decisions or procedures of the primary institutions. In addition, we analyze the available data on seven investigated cases in more detail. Positive aspects in the Finnish system are a fairly good infrastructure to investigate suspected RCR violations and a wide concept of RCR violations, which consists of fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, misappropriation, and other misbehaviors. However, the guidelines contain poorly elaborated definitions, do not treat the complainant and the suspect in an equal way, and need to be revised. Confusion about the concepts and criteria of the RCR violations seems to be common in primary institutions and among the complainants. Even if research institutions and universities have officially adhered to the national RCR guidelines, slipping from the guidelines occurs quite commonly. All these factors lead to frequent dissatisfaction with the decisions or procedures applied, high rate of appeals to TENK, and far from optimal functionality of the system.

Open science and codes of conduct on research integrity

“…One researcher interviewed by Schuurbiers et al even referred to a "diarrhoea of codes". More recent studies on content and definitions, especially on research misconduct, raise the lack of harmony among codes as a concern (Godecharle et al, 2014;Räsänen & Moore, 2016;Resnik et al, 2015). Whether the perception of shift of focus from one decade to another is accurate requires a more systematic analysis of the literature than I have been able to do in this article.…”

Research Integrity and Peer Review—past highlights and future directions

“…Published articles have covered issues that can occur during the phases of research and publication. These include how research is funded [ 6 ] and reviewed [ 7 , 8 ], guidelines on research integrity [ 9 ], researchers’ perceptions on research misbehaviour [ 10 ] and their views on the publishing process [ 11 ]. Challenging topics have been tackled also, including how to handle appropriate disclosure of conflicts of interest [ 12 ], how to agree authorship contributions [ 13 ] and what is appropriate in terms of citation practices [ 14 , 15 ] and text-recycling [ 16 , 17 ].…”