The ethics of expert communication.

Despite its public visibility and impact on policy, the activity of expert communication rarely receives more than a passing mention in codes of scientific integrity. This paper makes the case for an ethics of expert communication, introducing a framework where expert communication is represented as an intrinsically ethical activity of a deliberative agent. Ethical expert communication cannot be ensured by complying with various requirements, such as restricting communications to one's area of expertise or disclosing conflicts of interest. Expert communication involves morally laden trade-offs that must be weighed by a deliberative agent. A basic normative framework is introduced, and concrete provisions are proposed for codes of scientific integrity.

Publication Ethics in the Era of Artificial Intelligence.

The application of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), to science affects the way and methodology in which research is conducted. While the responsible use of AI brings many innovations and benefits to science and humanity, its unethical use poses a serious threat to scientific integrity and literature. Even in the absence of malicious use, the Chatbot output itself, as a software application based on AI, carries the risk of containing biases, distortions, irrelevancies, misrepresentations and plagiarism. Therefore, the use of complex AI algorithms raises concerns about bias, transparency and accountability, requiring the development of new ethical rules to protect scientific integrity. Unfortunately, the development and writing of ethical codes cannot keep up with the pace of development and implementation of technology. The main purpose of this narrative review is to inform readers, authors, reviewers and editors about new approaches to publication ethics in the era of AI. It specifically focuses on tips on how to disclose the use of AI in your manuscript, how to avoid publishing entirely AI-generated text, and current standards for retraction.

A narrative review of the phenomenon of predatory journals to create awareness among researchers in veterinary medicine.

In recent years, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of predatory journals has increased significantly. Predatory journals exploit the "open-access model" by engaging in deceptive practices such as charging high publication fees without providing the expected quality and performing insufficient or no peer review. Such behaviors undermine the integrity of scientific research and can result in researchers having trouble identifying reputable publication opportunities, particularly early-career researchers who struggle to understand and establish the correct criteria for publication in reputable journals. Publishing in journals that do not fully cover the criteria for scientific publication is also an ethical issue. This review aimed to describe the characteristics of predatory journals, differentiate between reliable and predatory journals, investigate the reasons that lead researchers to publish in predatory journals, evaluate the negative impact of predatory publications on the scientific community, and explore future perspectives. The authors also provide some considerations for researchers (particularly early-career researchers) when selecting journals for publication, explaining the role of metrics, databases, and artificial intelligence in manuscript preparation, with a specific focus on and relevance to publication in veterinary medicine.

The Multiple Challenges of Handling Scientific Integrity in the Swiss Higher Education System.

Scientific integrity is the most important aspect that higher education institutions have to take care of, as it conveys credibility and acceptance of science to the public. Although science has a very powerful built-in self-regulation process for detecting and correcting scientific misconduct, there is a need for clear guidelines that have to be adapted on regular intervals to the rapidly changing world caused by scientific developments themselves. Outlined here are recent advances in how Switzerland increases awareness and transparency of scientific misconduct and how it handles cases of misconduct to improve the quality of science.

Good practice in medicine and biology: scientific integrity needs global bioethics.

We consider scientific integrity to constitute a new theory of morality of science, in a very specific deontological sense. Indeed, at least in practice, scientific integrity extends beyond scientific concerns, seeking to develop specific moral duties and/or procedures based on general moral values and/or standards, leading to common moral frameworks for usual scientific practices. This is, of course, necessary. Contemporary history has shown us only too well that usual scientific practices need common moral frameworks, especially in medicine and biology. However, like scientific practices, and medical and biological practices in particular, the persistence of certain moral values and/or standards and the priority attributed to them, can change significantly, due to changes in society, people, the times and/or environments, and they may be under strong tension. We therefore believe that a new theory of ethics of science, in a very specific teleological sense, may be required in this case, particularly in medicine and biology, in addition to scientific integrity. This ethical theory, through research, professionals and structures in ethics of science also called medical ethics, research ethics or bioethics in the fields of medicine and biology, should seek to identify and find specific ethical solutions to these tensions, applicable at a particular place and time, based on common ethical purposes and/or consequences. As a result, these specific ethical solutions may, or may not, lead to an evolution of common moral frameworks, which may, or may not, be developed on the basis of scientific integrity. In the fields of medicine and biology, this ethical theory is closely related to another theory, global bioethics, but with a number of new conceptual and methodological developments.

Women Are Underrepresented Among Authors of Retracted Publications: Retrospective Study of 134 Medical Journals.

We examined the gender distribution of authors of retracted articles in 134 medical journals across 10 disciplines, compared it with the gender distribution of authors of all published articles, and found that women were underrepresented among authors of retracted articles, and, in particular, of articles retracted for misconduct.

An unethical trial and the politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil: The case of Prevent Senior.

The Brazilian Federal Senate created a Parliamentary Inquiry Commission (CPI) to investigate the Bolsonaro government's irregularities in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the cases that drew attention was the research conducted by Prevent Senior, a private health insurance company, on the early treatment of COVID-19. The article analyzes the scientific validity of the research and the ethical problems related to its implementation. It is based on analysis of Prevent Senior's report of the clinical study, the Brazilian and USA clinical trial registries, the Senate's CPI report, and on the information reported by the media. This case of scientific fraud and political-ideological bias exemplifies how Prevent Senior, using a questionable protocol to enhance its reputation and gain government support, was instrumental in building the "early treatment" narrative for COVID-19, and shows how it served as a basis for a government public policy that promoted the use of ineffective drugs.

Scientific evidence invalidates health assumptions underlying the FCC and ICNIRP exposure limit determinations for radiofrequency radiation: implications for 5G.

In the late-1990s, the FCC and ICNIRP adopted radiofrequency radiation (RFR) exposure limits to protect the public and workers from adverse effects of RFR. These limits were based on results from behavioral studies conducted in the 1980s involving 40-60-minute exposures in 5 monkeys and 8 rats, and then applying arbitrary safety factors to an apparent threshold specific absorption rate (SAR) of 4 W/kg. The limits were also based on two major assumptions: any biological effects were due to excessive tissue heating and no effects would occur below the putative threshold SAR, as well as twelve assumptions that were not specified by either the FCC or ICNIRP. In this paper, we show how the past 25 years of extensive research on RFR demonstrates that the assumptions underlying the FCC's and ICNIRP's exposure limits are invalid and continue to present a public health harm. Adverse effects observed at exposures below the assumed threshold SAR include non-thermal induction of reactive oxygen species, DNA damage, cardiomyopathy, carcinogenicity, sperm damage, and neurological effects, including electromagnetic hypersensitivity. Also, multiple human studies have found statistically significant associations between RFR exposure and increased brain and thyroid cancer risk. Yet, in 2020, and in light of the body of evidence reviewed in this article, the FCC and ICNIRP reaffirmed the same limits that were established in the 1990s. Consequently, these exposure limits, which are based on false suppositions, do not adequately protect workers, children, hypersensitive individuals, and the general population from short-term or long-term RFR exposures. Thus, urgently needed are health protective exposure limits for humans and the environment. These limits must be based on scientific evidence rather than on erroneous assumptions, especially given the increasing worldwide exposures of people and the environment to RFR, including novel forms of radiation from 5G telecommunications for which there are no adequate health effects studies.

Signaling the trustworthiness of science.

Trust in science increases when scientists and the outlets certifying their work honor science's norms. Scientists often fail to signal to other scientists and, perhaps more importantly, the public that these norms are being upheld. They could do so as they generate, certify, and react to each other's findings: for example, by promoting the use and value of evidence, transparent reporting, self-correction, replication, a culture of critique, and controls for bias. A number of approaches for authors and journals would lead to more effective signals of trustworthiness at the article level. These include article badging, checklists, a more extensive withdrawal ontology, identity verification, better forward linking, and greater transparency.

Benchmarking Scientific Image Forgery Detectors.

The field of scientific image integrity presents a challenging research bottleneck given the lack of available datasets to design and evaluate forensic techniques. The sensitivity of data also creates a legal hurdle that restricts the use of real-world cases to build any accessible forensic benchmark. In light of this, there is no comprehensive understanding on the limitations and capabilities of automatic image analysis tools for scientific images, which might create a false sense of data integrity. To mitigate this issue, we present an extendable open-source algorithm library that reproduces the most common image forgery operations reported by the research integrity community: duplication, retouching, and cleaning. We create a large scientific forgery image benchmark (39,423 images) with enriched ground truth using this library and realistic scientific images. All figures within the benchmark are synthetically doctored using images collected from creative commons sources. While collecting the source images, we ensured that the they did not present any suspicious integrity problems. Because of the high number of retracted papers due to image duplication, this work evaluates the state-of-the-art copy-move detection methods in the proposed dataset, using a new metric that asserts consistent match detection between the source and the copied region. All evaluated methods had a low performance in this dataset, indicating that scientific images might need a specialized copy-move detector. The dataset and source code are available at https://github.com/phillipecardenuto/rsiil .

Transparency in authors' contributions and responsibilities to promote integrity in scientific publication.

In keeping with the growing movement in scientific publishing toward transparency in data and methods, we propose changes to journal authorship policies and procedures to provide insight into which author is responsible for which contributions, better assurance that the list is complete, and clearly articulated standards to justify earning authorship credit. To accomplish these goals, we recommend that journals adopt common and transparent standards for authorship, outline responsibilities for corresponding authors, adopt the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) (docs.casrai.org/CRediT) methodology for attributing contributions, include this information in article metadata, and require authors to use the ORCID persistent digital identifier (https://orcid.org). Additionally, we recommend that universities and research institutions articulate expectations about author roles and responsibilities to provide a point of common understanding for discussion of authorship across research teams. Furthermore, we propose that funding agencies adopt the ORCID identifier and accept the CRediT taxonomy. We encourage scientific societies to further authorship transparency by signing on to these recommendations and promoting them through their meetings and publications programs.

Nursing instructors' clinical education competencies: An integrated review.

OBJECTIVE: To identify nursing instructors' clinical education competencies. METHODS: The integrative review comprised research articles published between 2008 and 2018 on Medline, Scopus, Web of Science and Education Information Resource Centre databases searched through relevant key words. All the short listed papers were reviewed and quality assessment was done. Data was analysed using content analysis method. Nursing instructors' clinical education competencies were extracted from the original texts in the form of initial codes which were categorised into subcategories and categories based on comparisons of their similarities and differences. Finally, themes were extracted as expression of content hidden in the data to generate new insights. RESULTS: Of the 17 studies selected, 6(35.3%) were quantitative, 4(23.5%) qualitative, 3(17.6%) review studies and 4(23.5%) were mixed-methods studies. Three overarching themes identified were clinical teaching process competencies, students' supervision competencies in clinical settings and nursing instructors' professional ethics. CONCLUSIONS: The review provides insightful information on nursing instructors' clinical education competencies. Nursing educational institutions need to be encouraged to incorporate these concepts into educational curricula to empower nursing instructors and to enhance the quality of clinical education.

Medical Students' Acquaintance with Core Concepts, Institutions and Guidelines on Good Scientific Practice: A Pre- and Post-questionnaire Survey.

German medical students are not sufficiently introduced to the ethical principles and pitfalls of scientific work. Therefore, a compulsory course on good scientific practice (GSP) has been developed and implemented into the curriculum of medical students, with the goal to foster scientific integrity and prevent scientific misconduct. Students' knowledge and attitudes towards GSP were evaluated by a pre-post-teaching questionnaire survey (n = 239). Most participants initially had startling knowledge gaps in the field. Moreover, they were not acquainted with core institutions on GSP, the office of ombudsperson and the nationally binding guidelines on GSP. The pre-post-teaching comparison showed statistically significant improvement in all areas tested; moreover, after the course participants confided more trust in GSP institutions. Applying ethical rules into practice can be challenging; therefore, students need to learn to work independently with guidelines on GSP and should be introduced to institutions providing further guidance. As our study has shown, students are very willing to pursue a scientific career based on integrity and honesty, however, they lack the knowledge how to do so. In light of our results, we therefore recommend to integrate courses on GSP already at an early time into the mandatory curriculum of medical students.

A Reflective Account of a Research Ethics Course for an Interdisciplinary Cohort of Graduate Students.

The graduate course in research ethics in the Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering at the National University of Singapore consists of a semester long mandatory course titled: "Research Ethics and Scientific Integrity." The course provides students with guiding principles for appropriate conduct in the professional and social settings of scientific research and in making morally weighted and ethically sound decisions when confronted with moral dilemmas. It seeks to enhance understanding and appreciation of the moral reasoning underpinning various rules and legislative constraints associated with research subjects and procedures. Further, students are trained to critically analyse cases and issues associated with scientific misconduct preparing them to act in a responsible and effective manner should they encounter such cases. The diverse background and training of the cohort also provide a unique setting and opportunity for student-initiated collaborative interdisciplinary learning. This article offers a reflective account of the course and some preliminary insights into learning outcomes.

Good Scientific Practice: Developing a Curriculum for Medical Students in Germany.

German medical schools have not yet sufficiently introduced students to the field of good scientific practice (GSP). In order to prevent scientific misconduct and to foster scientific integrity, courses on GSP must be an integral part of the curriculum of medical students. Based on a review of the literature, teaching units and materials for two courses on GSP were developed and tested in a pilot course. The pilot course was accompanied by a pre-post evaluation that assessed students' knowledge and attitudes towards scientific integrity and scientific misconduct. A syllabus was designed that comprised the following six topics: theoretical foundations of GSP; scientific publishing; empirical data; scientific supervision and teamwork; clinical research; personal interests. The comparison pre versus post-intervention yielded statistically significant changes in regard to the participants' knowledge and attitude toward all forms of scientific misconduct treated in the course. As the majority of participants was not familiar with the fundamental regulations or guidelines of GSP, it seems crucial to train students in actively applying such norms to real-world conflicts. Students' unfamiliarity with the fundamentals of GSP can be linked to the fact that many students have already experienced forms of scientific misconduct. Thus, GSP syllabi should be closely adjusted to a student's realm of experience. All in all, courses on GSP can be seen as a potential means to increase the number of young scholars.

Questionable research practices among Brazilian psychological researchers: Results from a replication study and an international comparison.

Research on scientific integrity is growing in psychology, and questionable research practices (QRPs) have received more attention due to its harmful effect on science. By replicating the procedures of previous research, the present study aimed at describing the use of QRPs among Brazilian psychological researchers and to make an international comparison with previous studies in other countries-the US and Italy. Two hundred and thirty-two Brazilian researchers in the field of psychology answered questions related to 10 different QRPs. Brazilian researchers indicated a lower tendency to engage in two QRPs (failing to report all of a study's dependent measures; deciding whether to collect more data after looking to see whether the results were significant) when compared to their Italian and North American counterparts, but indicated a higher tendency to engage in two other QRPs (selectively reporting studies that "worked"; not reporting all of a study's conditions). Most of the sample did not admit integrity conflicts in their own research but indicated that others have integrity problems, as observed in previous studies. Those discrepancies could be attributed to contextual and systemic factors regarding different publication demands among the different nations. Further studies should focus on identifying the antecedents of QRPs.

The Quest for Clarity in Research Integrity: A Conceptual Schema.

Researchers often refer to "research integrity", "scientific integrity", "research misconduct", "scientific misconduct" and "research ethics". However, they may use some of these terms interchangeably despite conceptual distinctions. The aim of this paper is to clarify what is signified by several key terms related to research integrity, and to suggest clearer conceptual delineation between them. To accomplish this task, it provides a conceptual analysis based upon definitions and general usage of these phrases and categorization of integrity-breaching behaviours in literature and guidelines, including clarification of the different domains and agents involved. In the first part of the analysis, following some initial clarifications, I explore the distinction between internal and external rules of integrity. In the second part, I explore the distinction between integrity and lack of misconduct, before suggesting a recategorisation of different types of integrity breach. I conclude that greater clarity is needed in the debate on research integrity. Distinguishing between scientific and research integrity, reassessing the relative gravity of different misbehaviours in light of this distinction, and recognising all intentional breaches of integrity as misconduct may help to improve guidelines and education.

A New Method for a Virtue-Based Responsible Conduct of Research Curriculum: Pilot Test Results.

Drawing on Pennock's theory of scientific virtues, we are developing an alternative curriculum for training scientists in the responsible conduct of research (RCR) that emphasizes internal values rather than externally imposed rules. This approach focuses on the virtuous characteristics of scientists that lead to responsible and exemplary behavior. We have been pilot-testing one element of such a virtue-based approach to RCR training by conducting dialogue sessions, modeled upon the approach developed by Toolbox Dialogue Initiative, that focus on a specific virtue, e.g., curiosity and objectivity. During these structured discussions, small groups of scientists explore the roles they think the focus virtue plays and should play in the practice of science. Preliminary results have shown that participants strongly prefer this virtue-based model over traditional methods of RCR training. While we cannot yet definitively say that participation in these RCR sessions contributes to responsible conduct, these pilot results are encouraging and warrant continued development of this virtue-based approach to RCR training.

Lack of Improvement in Scientific Integrity: An Analysis of WoS Retractions by Chinese Researchers (1997-2016).

This study investigated the status quo of article retractions by Chinese researchers. The bibliometric information of 834 retractions from the Web of Science SCI-expanded database were downloaded and analysed. The results showed that the number of retractions increased in the past two decades, and misconduct such as plagiarism, fraud, and faked peer review explained approximately three quarters of the retractions. Meanwhile, a large proportion of the retractions seemed typical of deliberate fraud, which might be evidenced by retractions authored by repeat offenders of data fraud and those due to faked peer review. In addition, a majority of Chinese fraudulent authors seemed to aim their articles which contained a possible misconduct at low-impact journals, regardless of the types of misconduct. The system of scientific evaluation, the "publish or perish" pressure Chinese researchers are facing, and the relatively low costs of scientific integrity may be responsible for the scientific integrity. We suggested more integrity education and severe sanctions for the policy-makers, as well as change in the peer review system and transparent retraction notices for journal administrators.