The past decade has seen extensive research carried out on the systematic causes of research misconduct. Simultaneously, less attention has been paid to the variation in academic misconduct between research fields, as most empirical studies focus on one particular discipline. We propose that academic discipline is one of several systematic factors that might contribute to academic misbehavior. Drawing on a neo-institutional approach, we argue that in the developing countries, the norm of textual originality has not drawn equal support across different (...) research fields depending on its level of internationalization. Using plagiarism detection software, we analyzed 2,405 doctoral dissertations randomly selected from all dissertations defended in Russia between 2007 and 2015. We measured the globalization of each academic discipline by calculating the share of publications indexed in the global citation database in relation to overall output. Our results showed that, with an average share of detected borrowings of over 19%, the incidence of plagiarism in Russia is remarkably higher than in Western countries. Overall, disciplines closely follow the pattern of higher globalization associated with a lower percentage of borrowed text. We also found that plagiarism is less prevalent at research-oriented institutions supporting global ethical standards. Our findings suggest that it might be misleading to measure the prevalence of academic misconduct in developing countries without paying attention to variations at the disciplinary level. (shrink)

The topics of ethical conduct and governance in academic research in the business field have attracted scientific and public attention. The concern is that research misconduct in organizations such as business schools and universities might result in practitioners, policymakers, and researchers grounding their decisions on biased research results. This study addresses ethical research misconduct by investigating whether the ethical orientation of business researchers is related to the likelihood of research misconduct, such as selective reporting of research findings. We distinguish between (...) deontological and consequentialist ethical orientations and the competition between researchers and investigate the moderating role of their perceived autonomy. Based on global data collected from 1031 business scholars, we find that researchers with a strong deontological ethical orientation are less prone to misconduct. This effect is robust against different levels of perceived autonomy and competition. In contrast, researchers having a consequentialist ethical orientation is positively associated with misconduct in business research. High levels of competition in the research environment reinforce this effect. Our results reveal a potentially toxic combination comprising researchers with a strong consequentialist orientation who are embedded in highly competitive research environments. Our research calls for the development of ethical orientations grounded on maxims rather than anticipated consequences among researchers. We conclude that measures for ethical governance in business schools should consider the ethical orientation that underlies researchers’ decision-making and the organizational and institutional environment in which business researchers are embedded. (shrink)

Research integrity and misconduct have recently risen to public attention as policy issues. Concern has arisen about divergence between this policy discourse and the language and concerns of scientists. This interview study, carried out in Denmark with a cohort of highly internationalised natural scientists, explores how researchers talk about integrity and good science. It finds, first, that these scientists were largely unaware of the Danish Code of Conduct for Responsible Conduct of Research and indifferent towards the value of such codes; (...) second, that they presented an image of good science as nuanced and thereby as difficult to manage through abstracted, principle-based codes; and third, that they repeatedly pointed to systemic issues both as triggering misconduct and as ethical problems in and of themselves. Research integrity is framed as a part of wider moves to ‘responsibilise’ science; understood in these terms, resistance to codes of conduct and the representation of integrity as a problem of science as a whole can be seen as a rejection of a neoliberal individualisation of responsibility. (shrink)

Publication pressure has been touted to promote questionable research practices (QRP) and scientific or research misconduct (RM). However, logically attractively as it is, there is no unequivocal evidence for this notion, and empirical studies have produced conflicting results. Other than difficulties in obtaining unbiased empirical data, a direct causal relationship between perceived publication pressure (PPP) and QRP/RM is inherently difficult to establish, because the former is a complex biopsychosocial construct that is variedly influenced by multiple personal and environmental factors. To (...) effectively address QRP/RM by tackling the sources of PPP would also be difficult because of the competitive nature of the reward and merit system of contemporary science. We might do better with efforts in enhancing knowledge in research ethics and integrity among the practitioners, as well as institutional infrastructures and mechanisms to fairly and efficiently adjudicate cases of QRP/RM. (shrink)