The Scientific Misconduct Questionnaire-Revised (SMQ-R) represents a validated instrument, but it is narrow in scope as it measures clinical trial coordinators’ experiences with research misconduct. Mavrinac and colleagues validated a questionnaire that included attitudes toward plagiarism, which represents only one construct of responsible misconduct. Presently, only a few validated instruments that assess attitudes exist regarding RCR. Indeed, attitudes serve as a precondition "for someone to consider applying their learned knowledge or skills". Responsible conduct in research (RCR) may also be dependent on acquiring attitudes that reflect accepted norms regarding RCR.
These include inadequate training, commercial and academic conflicts of interest, institutional failures of oversight, negative personality traits, failure of the organizational research climate to foster research integrity, and career and funding pressures. Ī variety of reasons can explain scientific misbehaviors. These studies demonstrating extensive research misconduct serve to raise doubts regarding investigators’ integrity, which can erode society’s trust in science. Felaefel and colleagues surveyed academics from several countries in the Middle East and showed that 59.4% of respondents self-reported committing at least one misbehavior. Okonta and Rossouw revealed that 68.9% of Nigerian investigators admitted to having committed at least one of eight listed of types of scientific misconduct.
Studies from non-Western countries have shown a higher prevalence of research misbehaviors. The frequencies for other misbehaviors were above 5% for example, "inappropriately assigning authorship credit" was 10.0%, and “dropping observations or data points from analyses based on a gut feeling” was 15.3%. Regarding misconduct from the West, Martinson and colleagues surveyed US investigators’ self-report of their misbehaviors and demonstrated that falsification and plagiarism were 0.3% and 1.4%, respectively. Studies have documented the prevalence of research misconduct in Western and in non-Western settings.
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