Systemic Obstacles to Addressing Research Misconduct in Higher Education: A Case Study

Abstract

Several widely publicized incidents of academic research misconduct, combined with the politicization of the role of science in public health and policy discourse (e.g., COVID, immunizations) threaten to undermine faith in the integrity of empirical research. Researchers often maintain that peer-review and study replication allow the field to self-police and self-correct; however, stark disparities between official reports of academic research misconduct and self-reports of academic researchers, specifically with regard to data fabrication, belie this argument. Further, systemic imperatives in academic settings often incentivize institutional responses that focus on minimizing reputational harm rather than the impact of fabricated data on the integrity of extant and future research.

Editor's vale dictum: Activities, challenges and reflections from the line in between 2011 and 2023, Journal of Clinical Psychology

“…A contemporary example of the systemic factors and obstacles to professional oversight and correction of research misconduct is vividly described in a case study of William Fals‐Stewart, a prolific academic psychologist who received over $10 million dollars in grants from the National Institute of Drug Abuse (Golden et al, 2023; Golden was a Project Director on two of these grants). These grants brought in sizeable indirect funds to his home institutions.…”

“…No institution and no professional association have conducted a review of the papers published under this period of questionable conduct. In fact, Golden et al (2023) provide evidence that these papers—including intervention studies of behavioral couples therapy—are often cited, appearing in meta‐analytic and systematic reviews that are often used to inform treatment and policy.…”

Accelerating addiction research via Open Science and Team Science

“…However, while falsification of data clearly is a terrible and intentional offense, it is estimated to be extremely rare and thus likely does not have the biggest impact on the bias in the literature. It is worth mentioning though that addiction science has been the center of one of the most prolific data falsification cases in recent times (Golden et al, 2023).…”

Editorial: Researching research integrity – and saying goodbye

“…Yet research misconduct is not dissipating. If anything, instances of it are increasing (Golden et al, 2023; Houle et al, 2023; Xie et al, 2021).…”