Seasoned academics are “calculating” about research misconduct and are most likely to be deterred by robust detection and enforcement rather than better education, an Australian study has found.

But whistleblower protections are critical in discouraging junior scientists from becoming habituated to dodgy research. And scientists at all levels of seniority tend to follow the rules rigorously if they believe their research risks real-world harm.

Academics from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and UNSW Sydney have used a “discrete choice experiment” – a technique typically employed in consumer research, transport modelling and health economics – to tease out the factors most likely to encourage or discourage research misconduct.

The study, in the journal Higher Education Research & Development, investigated the relative influence of 11 separate factors – including pressure to publish, the need for specialist expertise and the potential to harm humans, animals or the environment – on researchers’ willingness to bend or break the rules.

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Overall, more severe penalties and higher likelihood of investigation emerged as the “main drivers” of scrupulousness – particularly among experienced researchers.

“Senior academics have obviously been around for a long time,” said lead researcher Paul Burke, a professor of marketing at UTS. “They know what’s appropriate [and] what’s inappropriate. There’s no point doing another workshop on…ethical conduct.”

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The study found that early career researchers were highly influenced by the behaviour of their senior colleagues. This suggested that channels for “safe reporting of observed misconduct” were particularly important for this group.

Protection of whistleblowers has the dual benefit of allowing junior researchers to call out misbehaviour rather than embrace it, while also helping to discourage misconduct among senior researchers, Burke said. “It is about…creating a culture of what is the norm in terms of academic misconduct. Model behaviour is really important. It’s not just the skill sets we’re learning but also how to present our research.”

Burke, deputy director of the Centre for Business Intelligence and Data Analytics at UTS Business School, said there was a “huge spectrum” of research misconduct and most fell at the lower end – such as people rerunning experiments that did not support their hypotheses – rather than complete fabrication.

“But it’s something we all have to be aware of,” he said. “The publish-or-perish type of mindset places a lot of pressure on all academics.”

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About 43 per cent of the 750-odd study subjects said they felt “very real” pressures to engage in misconduct, and 38 per cent said they had observed it among senior academics. The findings suggest that a “one-size-fits-all” approach to research integrity is unlikely to be effective, Burke said.

The study found that academics in the hard sciences and medical disciplines, irrespective of seniority, were particularly deterred from misconduct. “As soon as you involve people or animals or…the environment or researchers themselves, where [the] risks become a bit higher, there’s an obligation to worry about those potential harms,” Burke said.

However, neither the complexity of research methodologies nor the quality of institutional integrity mentoring had a major impact on academics’ propensity to commit research misconduct, even though 67 per cent of the 750-odd respondents said mentoring at their workplaces was inadequate.

Discrete choice experiments (DCEs) involve hypothetical scenarios where research subjects indicate how they would respond to certain influences in the presence or absence of others. In traditional Likert surveys, respondents tend to say “everything’s important”, Burke said. “The beauty of DCEs is that you’re getting them to trade off between those factors.”

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john.ross@timeshighereducation.com