Abstract
In many countries, attention for fostering research integrity started with a misconduct case that got a lot of media exposure. But there is an emerging consensus that questionable research practices (QRPs) are more harmful due to their high prevalence. QRPs have in common that they can help to make study results more exciting, more positive and more statistically significant. That makes them tempting to engage in. Research institutions have the duty to empower their research staff to steer away from QRPs and to explain how they realise that in a Research Integrity Promotion Plan. Avoiding perverse incentives in assessing researchers for career advancement is an important element in that plan. Research institutions, funding agencies and journals should make their research integrity policies as evidence based as possible. The dilemmas and distractions researchers face are real and universal. We owe it to society to collaborate and to do our utmost best to prevent QRPs and to foster research integrity.
This chapter is a reprint of the previously published Open Access (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License) article Bouter, L. What Research Institutions Can Do to Foster Research Integrity. Sci Eng Ethics 26, 2363–2369 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-020-00178-5.
Based on the Dies Lecture on the occasion of the 92nd Dies Natalis of Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands, 21 November, 2019.
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Bouter, L. (2022). What Research Institutions Can Do to Foster Research Integrity. In: Faintuch, J., Faintuch, S. (eds) Integrity of Scientific Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99680-2_59
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