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Feature: Ethical problems concern academics

"Graduate students probably cannot graduate without delivering a significant result; for college professors, it will affect whether they can secure tenure, and worse yet, whether they can hold onto their jobs."

anatomy professor at a Taiwan medical institution

News reports of two alleged ethics violations by researchers have thrown the validity of research conducted in Taiwan into question.

In the first case, a young researcher at the National Chung Hsing University whose dissertation was published in the journal Cell was accused of altering the images he used to demonstrate the results of his research.

Another incident occurred at National Taiwan University (NTU) Hospital, when a young physician's research paper was rejected by the review board for the journal Cancer for alleged plagiarism.

Both institutions have embarked on efforts to control the damage done by the incidents.

While Chung Hsing asked the researcher to return the funds that had been allocated for his research, the ethics committee of NTU hospital passed a resolution to suspend promotions for the physician for five years.

Reports of the two incidents in both domestic and international media outlets have forced prominent scientists to speak up.

Wong Chi-huey (翁啟惠), president of Academia Sinica, issued an official statement over the weekend stating that scientific research is valued for its originality and that any violation of academic ethics must be penalized in accordance with the severity of the breach.

"Manipulating and fabricating research statistics are considered malicious ethical violations," Wong said. "Not only will the researchers lose their credibility, they also risk misleading others."

Wong said that the National Science Council had ordered the Chung Hsing researcher to perform his experiments again.

If the results of the second round of experiments were consistent with what the researcher demonstrated in the allegedly doctored photos, the finding could be academically significant but ethically flawed, he said.

But if the repeated experiments failed to corroborate the findings demonstrated in the photos, then the researcher deserves to be punished for fabricating his research results, he said.

Wong said that while the NTU researcher's plagiarized descriptions of experiments had little effect on his findings, his research should still be considered flawed.

Wong further commented that a fierce scholarly competition among researchers and the lack of proper training in academic ethics are two factors that led to the violations.

Some, on the other hand, have argued that researchers are tempted to tweak their findings for other reasons.

An anatomy professor in one of the nation's most prestigious medical institutions who spoke on the condition of anonymity said in an interview with the Taipei Times that the academic world's "publish or perish" mentality may have forced the researchers to take their chances with manipulating the results of their work.

"Both professors and graduate students are under tremendous pressure to have their research published in scholarly journals on a regular basis," he said.

"Graduate students probably cannot graduate without delivering a significant result; for college professors, it will affect whether they can secure tenure, and worse yet, whether they can hold onto their jobs," he said.

His institution, the anatomy professor said, evaluates a teacher's performance every two years.

Each teacher is judged based on the number of research articles he or she has had published and on whether the research is considered significant, he said.

If a teacher has been rated in the bottom 10 percent for two consecutive years, the review board would not recommend the school hire him for the next school year, he said.

"And even if you finally become a professor and secure tenure, you are still bound by this two-year evaluation," he said.

The competition to secure funding may also cause researchers to fabricate results.

The National Science Council, which is responsible for allocating research funds, has established a formula to decide which research should receive government funding.

The formula takes into account the length of a research article, its relative impact and whether the researcher is the main author or merely a coauthor.

Jessica Cheng (鄭其嘉), an assistant professor of public health at Fu Jen Catholic University, said the average professor in Taiwan is overloaded in terms of teaching hours.

Most of her time is now spent in teaching classes and preparing for classes, she said, which leaves very little time to perform quality research.

Both Cheng and the anatomy professor said that they were required to take an academic ethics course when they began work on their dissertations in the US.

The nation's universities should establish such courses to prevent future ethics violations, they said.

"The two incidents show that they [the two researchers accused of violations] have not learned the dos and don'ts of research," the anatomy professor said.
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