The Health Partners Research Foundation in Minneapolis mailed an anonymous survey to thousands of scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health. The survey asked respondents about a range of ethical practices relating to their research, such as outright falsification data, modifying research design to produce results more favorable to securing funding, or fudging the requirements on use of human subjects, etc.

Of 3,247 early- and mid-career researchers who responded, less than 1.5% admitted to falsification or plagiarism, the most serious types of misconduct listed. But 15.5% said they had changed the design, methodology or results of a study in response to pressure from a funding source; 12.5% admitted overlooking others’ use of flawed data; and 7.6% said they had circumvented minor aspects of requirements regarding the use of human subjects …

Overall, about a third admitted to at least one of the ten most serious offences on the list — a range of misbehaviours described by the authors as “striking in its breadth and prevalence”.

As we debate morality in anthropology, it is worth thinking about more basic ethical issues related to writing our ethnographies. Do we fudge our data and overlook inconvenient facts any more than other social scientists? One would like to think that anthropologists’ concern with the ethics of representation and the self-reflexive nature of modern ethnographies would serve to reduce such unethical practices, but the competitive nature of the current job market and our political commitments seem just as likely to pull us in the opposite direction. Still, one third of all respondents seems like a lot. I’d have to look at the original paper to see what this might mean.

(via Jonathan Benda)