title: Standards of Scientific Conduct: Disciplinary Differences.
abstract: Teaching of responsible conduct of research is largely predicated on the assumption that there are accepted standards of conduct that can be taught. However there is little evidence of consensus in the scientific community about such standards, at least for the practices of authorship, collaboration, and data management. To assess whether such differences in standards are based on disciplinary differences, a survey, described previously, addressing standards, practices, and perceptions about teaching and learning was distributed in November 2010 to US faculty from 50 graduate programs for the biomedical disciplines of microbiology, neuroscience, nursing, and psychology. Despite evidence of statistically significant differences across the four disciplines, actual differences were quite small. Stricter measures of effect size indicated practically significant disciplinary differences for fewer than 10% of the questions. This suggests that the variation in individual standards of practice within each discipline is at least as great as variation due to differences among disciplines. Therefore, the need for discipline-specific training may not be as important as sometimes thought.
authors.affiliation: Research Ethics Program, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive #0612, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0612, USA. mkalichman@ucsd.edu.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kalichman
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and CREATE, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive #0036, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0036, USA. msweet@ucsd.edu.
authors.forename: Monica
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sweet
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology and Research Ethics Program, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive #0612, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0612, USA. dplemmons@ucsd.edu.|Division of Research Affairs, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA. dplemmons@ucsd.edu.
authors.forename: Dena
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Plemmons
mesh_terms: D001319:Authorship; D035843:Biomedical Research / Q000193:education / Q000941:ethics*; D032921:Consensus; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D032984:Ethics, Research / Q000193:education*; D006801:Humans; D008829:Microbiology / Q000193:education / Q000941:ethics*; D009488:Neurosciences / Q000193:education / Q000941:ethics*; D015399:Nursing Research / Q000193:education / Q000941:ethics; D011584:Psychology / Q000193:education / Q000941:ethics*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014481:United States
keywords: Authorship; Collaboration; Data management; Research ethics; Responsible conduct of research; Standards