10 Essential Qualities of Ethical Researchers

Being a researcher is a task for someone who can wear many hats in a day and can perform tasks with little or no monitoring. But how well you do your tasks is not what makes you a good researcher. How intelligently or efficiently you perform tasks can maybe make you a popular researcher, but not necessarily an ethical researcher. Apart from executing tasks, it is an individual’s inherent value propositions that differentiate an ethical researcher who practices research integrity from an unethical researcher.

Research ethics vs. research integrity

The terms research integrity and research ethics are distinct but are often used synonymously. Here we try to discern and define the two terms. Research integrity refers to the way the research is performed and communicated transparently, rigorously, and accountably so that it can be reproduced yielding similar results. On the other hand, research ethics is all about doing and planning a research project, while keeping in mind the responsibilities toward key stakeholders, including researchers, participants, colleagues, employers, funders, and society at large.

In 2019, Jørgen Carling explained that research ethics and research integrity are distinct terms but can overlap because the implications of a violation of research ethics reflect on research integrity and vice versa.¹ For example, manipulating images to demonstrate desired results is a violation of research integrity but it is also irresponsible and unethical as the research outcome is manipulated without considering the implications on the stakeholders who use the research in question. So, what qualities or values should you have or build to become a more ethical researcher?

Key qualities every ethical researcher should have²

Discussed below are 10 values that every researcher should practice and develop to become an ethical researcher. While many of these are overlapping or related, I’ve described each of the qualities using the definitions provided in the Online Cambridge English Dictionary.

1. Empathy

Empathy is the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation. The opposite of empathy is callousness. An empathetic person will be able to think and understand the pain that they are causing to the participants of the research. One such controversial research experiment that is still debated in the field of psychology is the 1971 Prison Experiment, by Philip G. Zimbardo, Professor in Psychology at Stanford, who used volunteers to find out what happens to normal people if they are imprisoned. The volunteer prisoners faced extreme stress while the volunteer guards acted as sadists, revealing that group dynamics and social structure can encourage people to harm each other. The questionable research ethics raised questions about the validity of the experiment, which only lasted 6 days. The lack of empathy, which helps you to think beyond and out of the box to plan and conduct experiments that do not cause harm, stood out as a sore point here. Perlstadt believes that the outcome of the experiment should be shared with students as a “cautionary tale” when designing experiments.³

2. Compassion

Compassion is the wish to help someone in distress or suffering that follows a strong feeling of sympathy and sadness. This quality is especially invaluable when planning research that involves human and animal experiments. A compassionate researcher will liaise with the funders and participants to ensure enough safety measures are taken, including providing insurance or suffering damages when experiments such as drug testing cause an adverse reaction. One such heinous research program that came to light is the work done by Hwang Woo-suk in 2006. He was accused of bioethical violations and embezzlement when his cloning experiments were found to be using human embryonic stem cells procured from the black market and by coercing his graduate students.⁴

3. Honesty

Honesty is a quality that makes you seem trustworthy and sincere, unlikely to steal, lie, or cheat. This value helps to overcome self-interest and egomania so that decisions made are scrupulous. The value of honesty is important in the management of project funds, submission of ethical consent, application processing, and in many other aspects of research conduct. Honesty will help guide researchers to publish negative results in an effort to avoid the manipulation of data. One such case is that of Werner Bezwoda in 2000, who confessed to scientific misconduct and breach of honesty when he admitted to manipulating results to support the use of a combination treatment of high-dose chemotherapy and bone marrow transplantation for breast cancer.⁵

4. Transparency

Transparency is a term that is often used interchangeably with honesty but the difference here is that transparency is conducting your research work openly without secrets or hidden agendas. Transparency is very important when reporting research results, this includes clearly reporting negative results that can avoid duplication of effort, which is vital especially in the field of drug discovery. Another instance of transparency is when images are altered for presentation such as increasing the contrast of a less visible band. The researcher does this image enhancement to create an impressive presentation but forgets the importance of the value of transparency in disclosing results as obtained for scientific significance.

5. Open-mindedness

Open-mindedness is defined as being willing to consider new ideas and opinions that are different from your own. This is another important value in ethical research as it helps you avoid an egotistic research approach and ensure you consider opposing ideas and opinions or explore new directions to build on existing ideas and opinions. This value enhances the element of curiosity and encourages good dialog and discussion in research. Many great research discoveries, including the cracking of DNA as the genetic material, have happened because of open-minded research.

6. Rigorous

Being rigorous is the quality of being careful and considering every aspect of the research project to ascertain safety and correctness of the information or the experiment that is planned. Rigor is what steers researchers back to the archives when interpreting new results and allows one to think in different dimensions rather than rushing decisions to undertake further experiments that can waste resources and time. This value is critical for researchers who often tend to rely only on the most recent publications as references for their own work to meet a journal’s publication preferences.⁶

7. Accountable

The practice of learning to be accountable is taking responsibility for the research one plans, does, and communicates and being able to respond convincingly to any questions or opposing arguments. This value will help any researcher document their work diligently and make a methodical blueprint of the research plan such that all information is retrievable when confronted. Author accountability has been a major concern for publishers, which led to the introduction of the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) system that ensures the role and contributions of authors in a publication is listed correctly.

8. Obedience

Obedience is a valuable characteristic that is needed where liberty is seen as a free commodity without regard for generally accepted societal norms. This is specifically important for Generation Z, many of whom are early career researchers, and Generation Alpha, researchers who are just starting out. Obedience is a virtue in research, specifically in technology research, as technology provides one of the ready causes for addiction according to the Gainsbury’s team at the University of Sydney.⁷

We are in the IoT era when experiments are carried out in global laboratories connecting international locations, where laws across borders are very different and boundaries of ethical research have to be drawn while establishing such experimental labs. Moreover, contemporary researchers carrying samples across borders (such as seeds or culture, or drug samples) tend to bypass painstaking time-consuming paperwork seeking permits from the government and institutions as these papers are hardly scrutinized. Abiding with permit documentation is merely an act of social responsibility by the researcher, which mirrors the value of systems founded for human good. One such recent case is when a Yale University student disobeyed chemistry laboratory protocols and lost her life when her ponytail got caught in the machinery she was working on.⁸ Then there is Nobel Laureate Barry Marshall, known as “the guinea-pig doctor”, who experimented on himself without taking permissions from the ethics commission;⁹ luckily he is still alive to tell people not to do what he did.

9. Stewardship

Stewardship is the care and management that someone shows while performing and conducting research. More a leadership value, stewardship is a combination of other values, such as accountability and compassion. It motivates researchers to be more organized, plan better, and continue learning essential researcher skills such as time management. A classical incidence of the lack of stewardship is the chemistry lab explosion at Texas Tech University in January 2010. This incident led to an investigation by the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board that necessitated the university to revisit their laboratory safety protocols, implement periodic risk and hazard analysis, and make major administrative and procedural changes.¹⁰

10. Objectivity

Objectivity is the ability to avoid biases and form opinions based on facts, such that ideas and decisions are not influenced by one’s personal beliefs or feelings. When it comes to research ethics, personal beliefs regarding things such as racism, religious beliefs, cultural practices, political opinion, or patriotism can fail researchers. It can stop them from questioning wrong practices, acting when they witness questionable ethics, and can even be the underlying reason for the manipulation and fabrication of data. The frequently debated role of Rosalind Franklin in the discovery of the DNA structure is a classic example of how a lack of objectivity played a role in gender bias.¹¹

References:

1. Carling, J. (2019) Research ethics and research integrity, MIGNEX Handbook Chapter 4 (v1). Oslo: Peace Research Institute Oslo. Available at mignex.org/d013.
2. What is Research Integrity. Grants & Funding, NIH Central Resource for Grants and Funding Information. Available at https://grants.nih.gov/policy/research_integrity/what-is.htm
3. Perlstadt H. (2018). How to Get Out of the Stanford Prison Experiment: Revisiting Social Science Research Ethics. Current Research Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities 1(2). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12944/CRJSSH.1.2.01
4. Sungook, H. (2008). The Hwang Scandal That “Shook the World of Science”. East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 2:1, 1-7. DOI: 1215/s12280-008-9041-x
5. Gottlieb, S. (2000). Breast cancer researcher accused of serious scientific misconduct. The Western Journal of Medicine, 172(4), 229. DOI: 1136/ewjm.172.4.229
6. Poncela-Casasnovas, J., Gerlach, M., Aguirre, N. et al. (2019). Large-scale analysis of micro-level citation patterns reveals nuanced selection criteria. Nat Hum Behav 3, 568–575. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0585-7
7. Technology addiction. Brain and Mind Centre, The University of Sydney. Available at https://www.sydney.edu.au/brain-mind/our-research/technology-addiction.html
8. O’Leary, M.E. (2011, April 13). ‘A TRUE TRAGEDY’: Yale student asphyxiated in lathe accident at chemistry lab, medical examiner rules. New Haven Register. https://www.nhregister.com/news/article/A-TRUE-TRAGEDY-Yale-student-asphyxiated-in-11579699.php
9. Charisius, H. (2014). When Scientists Experiment on Themselves: H. pylori and Ulcers. Scientific American. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/when-scientists-experiment-on-themselves-h-pylori-and-ulcers/
10. Benderly, B.L. (2016, April 18). A tale of two explosions. Science. Available at https://www.science.org/content/article/tale-two-explosions
11. Lloyd, R. (2010, November 3). Rosalind Franklin and DNA: How wronged was she? Scientific American. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/rosalind-franklin-and-dna-how-wronged-was-she/