Introduction to Ethical Considerations in Research

G-DEP is funded by the NSF, and thus all program participants should know that research misconduct is never acceptable, and is not condoned by the NSF. The website for the Office of Inspector General (http://www.oig.nsf.gov) describes some typical situations/scenarios involving research misconduct, including the areas described below.

The best advice we can give at this point is: If you suspect research misconduct, or are uncertain of your OWN conduct, talk to someone about it, preferably your faculty mentor(s). You are just at the beginning of your careers, so some of your perceptions/sensitivities to these issues will change. Take the opportunity to read about ethics issues, and consider your choices carefully. For some people, reading about ethics is a real eye-opener! What seemed to be "okay" or acceptable behavior is actually not okay. If, after you participate in the discussions, do the readings, and consider the case studies, you realize that you may have been guilty of ... inappropriate conduct, it's best to realize the life lesson and go on ... for most of you, your misconduct has probably been on a small enough scale that it has not harmed others.

Once your eyes are opened, however, one must practice the ethical behaviors one has learned. As you grow in your profession, more and more care must be taken with ethical considerations. It is one of the most important aspects of anyone's career development.

The Sigma Xi scientific honor society has a pamphlet with a lot of useful information and things to think about, which was distributed in this workshop. You can also order another from Sigma Xi if you lost yours or want to give a copy to a colleague or friend. The following two areas "Citing Your Sources and Avoiding Plagiarism" and "Human Subject Research" should be of immediate interest to students entering the geosciences.

Citing Your Sources and Avoiding Plagiarism

Science is an organized social method for the production of reliable knowledge, knowledge that is based on facts collected in a repeatable way and related to theory through logic and reason.

It is social in the sense that all scientists build on the achievements of the people who went before them and report their findings publically so that others can use them in their own work. That is how science grows.

Critical to the system, then, is acknowledging your debts to the people who have gone before you and being honest in reporting your results and giving people enough details so that they could repeat what you did and get similar results. The whole system is built on trust.

That is why citing the sources of your ideas is so important and why the scientific and, indeed, the entire academic community comes down so harshly on plagiarism.

Plagiarism is using someone else's work without acknowledging its source: It is intellectual theft.

So, how and when do you cite other folks' work?

The most obvious occasion is when you use a direct quotation. If you use someone else's exact words, enclose them in quotation marks and then, after the endquote, list their last name and the year they wrote in parentheses. Then, put the period marking the end of the sentence. Some examples might be "blah, blah, blah" (Smith 1999: 15). Then, at the end of your paper, you have a list of your sources, arranged alphabetically by the last name of the author (or of the primary author). You give all the information someone would need to track the source down if they were so inclined. This way, your reader can easily find the source you cited in the text of your paper. Name (s). Year. Name of article. Name of Journal volume number, issue number: pages. Or name(s). Year. Name of Book. City of publisher: Name of publisher.

What about if you paraphrase what the author said? It's not a direct quotation, but it IS that person's idea and you found that idea in a very specific spot or pages. Because you're not using their words, you don't use quotation marks. But just before the period at the end of the sentence you paraphrased, you'd do the (Gomez 2002: 265) bit.

Okay, now what if you are sort of summarizing the whole gist of what the authors say? It's not like you could point to a specific sentence or paragraph or page: It's the tenor of the whole thing. Again, you need to cite anyone who has influenced your thinking. At the end of the sentence or paragraph where you discuss their works, you'd do the parenthetical citation but with just their last name or names and the year: no pages. Yatta, yatta, yatta (Sung and Lee 1998). Or maybe yatta, yatta, yatta but, on the other hand, blah, blah, blah (Sung and Lee 1998; Gomez 2002). What if it's someone's data set? Like you were using peak streamflow data for a creek in the San Gabriel Mountains collected by the USGS from 1931 on? Or maybe the Census to find out how many people live in a particular floodplain? You'd describe your data and give the source, with the responsible agency as the author (USGS 2002). If it's YOUR very own original data, you'll get to cite yourself!

When in doubt, cite. Cover your debts. The famous Turabian guide is a very good investment, one that you'll refer to a lot over the course of your collegiate and scientific career.

Human Subjects in Research

If your interests lie strictly within the physical sciences AND if you are very lucky, you may not need to be concerned with the ethics of using human beings as research subjects. Two of the earth sciences in G-DEP, however, have social science sides to them, geography and anthropology, and so often have to think about Human Subjects issues. Also, increasingly, even the more strictly physical science folks in geology or physical geography or geoarchaeology find themselves doing environmental work, which often features human beings and societies interacting with the natural systems of the planet. Maybe you're part of a research team studying a particular watershed, including the flood and drought hazards it presents and human alterations of its water quality, riparian flora and fauna, and essential functioning. Maybe your team will find itself interviewing stakeholders along the stream or collecting archival data about them. Bingo -- you must now deal with Human Subjects and seek institutional review of your research protocol, which might seem like a big pain in the tochas.

A little bit of context might help us understand this requirement. There have been some absolutely horrific misuses of human beings as research subjects over the last century. For example, the Nazis conducted terrible experiments on human beings to assess cold and pain tolerance, which often killed the research subjects (people drawn from the concentration camps).

The US government has not always been exactly noble in this regard. Some awful examples:

From 1932 to 1972, the Federal government funded the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, where a bunch of African-American men were diagnosed with syphilis and then, instead of treating them as promised, the researchers simply watched them as they sickened and most of them died, to document the effects of late-stage syphilis. Black men were treated as disposable lab animals and, without their consent, left to die of a treatable illness. James Jones' book, Bad Blood, summarizes this episode.

Then, there were the Manhattan Project plutonium injection experiments. The Manhattan Project was the research project that developed the atomic bomb. Plutonium was used as the trigger for the second atomic bomb, dropped on Nagasaki. The Manhattan Project medical researchers were worried about the effect of processing and handling plutonium on their research and factory workers and, so, they wanted to find out what it could do to the human body. So, from 1945 to 1947, they secretly arranged for 18 unsuspecting patients in hospital for routine reasons or on their deathbeds to be given plutonium by injection or ingestion. Eileen Welsome's The Plutonium Files discusses this series of experiments.

The CIA was no slouch, either. Worried about soldiers being "brainwashed" and giving up military secrets, they wanted to know more about the possibilities of mind control. They thought it would be great if they could find out ways of flipping out enemy leaders, too. One of these experiments involved the administration of LSD to unwitting human subjects, sometimes prisoners, sometimes soldiers, sometimes CIA researchers themselves (!), and sometimes patrons of brothels set up by the CIA for this purpose of observing the effects of an acid trip. A book on all this is Martin A. Lee's and Bruce Shlain's Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond.

So, because of these and similar grotesque violations of human beings' rights to informed consent and dignity, the Federal government now wants to prove it's learned its lesson by making sure that Federal money never again goes to fund such terrible studies. The Federal government expects each institution that gets any Federal money to certify that human beings who find themselves in the path of research are informed and consent to their involvement. Each institution has to have an Institutional Review Board or IRB, which reviews all research projects on campus. It judges whether the research could be done without human subjects or in a way that poses fewer risks to them and evaluates how well the researchers protect individual identity and privacy. The researcher can't just say, "I'm only going to collect some data and report them in an aggregate form and so I'm exempt." They may well be exempt from full review, but the IRB is the one who makes that decision. Getting IRB clearance is a pretty heavy-duty process but, hopefully, it will protect human beings from being the subject of inhumane research projects. Complying with the requirements for review, then, is part of being an ethical scientist. You can learn about the CSULB Human Subjects process at: http://www.csulb.edu/~research/4irb/irbmanual.htm.

Helpful Resources for Ethics in Science

http://onlineethics.org/ -- many helpful links and publication references for ethics issues in Science, Math, and Engineering.

http://www.oig.nsf.gov -- the National Science Foundation (NSF) maintains a website with information about their Office of the Inspector General (OIG) - in charge of auditing NSF awards and processes. Their charge includes investigations of alleged research misconduct.

http://www.sigmaxi.org -- the Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Honor Society maintains a website with links to their premier journal, American Scientist, as well as a list of the participants in the 2000 Sigma Xi Forum - New Ethical Challenges in Science and Technology.

Jones, James Howard. 1993. Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. New York: Free Press.

Lee, Martin A. and Shlain, Bruce. 1986. Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD, The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond. Berkeley, CA: Grove Press.

Sigma Xi. 1997. Honor in Science. Research Triangle Park, NC: Sigma Xi, The Scientific Honor Society.

Turabian, Kate L. 1996. A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Welsome, Eileen. 1999. The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War. New York: Dial Press.