SURVEY OF ETHICAL ISSUES IN DENTAL RESEARCH

The American Association for Dental Research (AADR) surveyed its leade rs to determine their perceptions of the prevalence of problematic res earch practices and the possible roles AADR should play in promoting s cientific integrity. Seventy-six of the 98 program chairs and Associat ion officers (1990-1995) surveyed responded. In general, these respond ents did not think that serious misconduct or sloppy science occurred more often in AADR than in other scientific disciplines. Overall, resp ondents rated practices that undermine the trustworthiness of science (falsifying or fabrication of research data, retaliation, failure to p resent negative results, failure to disclose involvement with commerci al enterprises, failure to maintain research records, etc.) as more se rious, but less prevalent, than practices considered disrespectful of the work of others (gift authorship, citing sources without reading th em, dividing a project into many small units, etc.). All respondents s aid that they had observed each of the less serious problematic practi ces one or more times, whereas 10% reported having observed retaliatio n, 30% reported having observed falsification, and 54% reported having observed plagiarism one or more times. AADR leaders had observed many more instances of misconduct and other problematic research practices than had faculty surveyed by Swazey et al. (1993), supporting conclus ions by Greenberg and Goldberg (1994) that status and years of experie nce are associated with more frequent observations of misconduct. With respect to the possible roles the AADR might play in promoting resear ch integrity, 88% thought that AADR should develop ethics cases and ma terials for educational use, 78% thought that AADR should create a pro cess for addressing allegations of misconduct, 72% thought that the As sociation should develop an ethics committee or consultation service, 55% thought it should create a yearly ethics symposium, and 45% though t that the AADR should develop a more specific code of ethics to compl ement the general code recently developed by the IADR.