Follow-up APS survey finds an increase in awareness of ethics guidelines — but not in compliance.
Ethical violations in physics are just as prevalent now as they were 20 years ago, finds a survey of early-career physicists and graduate students — even though awareness of ethics policies has become more widespread.
This story was published in Nature in January 2022, and the research it reports, highlights that the challenge for institutions is not to increase the awareness of research integrity, but to change research culture. AHRECS strongly believes that there must be a commitment to resourcing reflective practice, rather than a focus on compliance with rules. Discussion of research integrity principles needs to be situated within discussions of real research practice. Senior and respected researchers should lead the discussion of these matters.
Although the results show that institutions have made efforts to educate researchers on ethical issues, there has been “no substantive change in the power relations that were leading to such awful outcomes”, says Michael Marder, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the report. “I think the routine is for things to be ignored and business to go back to usual — that’s what we documented. So, the question is, how can we stop that?”
The 2020 survey was a follow-up to an initial survey on ethics education among early-career APS members that took place in 2003. Marder and his two colleagues wanted to evaluate whether ethics awareness and practice in physics had improved since then.
The authors received 1,390 responses from early-career physicists and 2,829 from physics graduate students, a 30% response rate. The survey repeated the same questions that were used in 2003, asking the junior researchers whether they had witnessed ethical violations in any of eight categories, from plagiarism to falsifying data.
