Teaching Research Ethics UREC workshop 22 February 2010

What is the University of Sheffield’s approach to research ethics and integrity? 14/09/2018 © The University of Sheffield

Devolution of responsibility Based on trusting colleagues Based on the belief that disciplines and funding units know their own fields and professional peers best Based on policy dissemination and staff development 14/09/2018 © The University of Sheffield

Devolution of responsibility is organisationally more demanding, rather than less demanding Based in the belief that if colleagues cannot be trusted to self-regulate, top-down regulation is unlikely to be more effective Aims to involve the widest possible spectrum of staff in the ethics approval process 14/09/2018 © The University of Sheffield

Devolution of responsibility also involves students Students are responsible, too Students must know about research ethics Research ethics should be incorporated across the curriculum Students must be involved in discussions about the ethics of their research projects

Behaving ethically in our research activities is not just a matter of safeguarding research subjects It is also a matter of safeguarding the reputations of ourselves, the University and the academic project

Research integrity This is a broader field than research ethics Applies to all kinds of research, not just to research with human participants Involves relationships with colleagues, students and the general public, as well as direct research subjects 14/09/2018 © The University of Sheffield

Transparency and openness Honesty and plagiarism Authorship and collaboration Communication strategies 14/09/2018 © The University of Sheffield

Teaching research ethics and integrity 14/09/2018 © The University of Sheffield

Accepting responsibility for our individual practice as researchers…and owning up Concrete cases and examples, rather than fine general principles Hard cases may make bad law…but they may make great teaching material 14/09/2018 © The University of Sheffield

Learning by doing…this is one of the points of student research projects Encourage students to be as comfortable as possible with the reality that there will sometimes be grey areas, and that a rule-governed ‘recipe’ approach is unlikely to be sufficiently responsive to the demands of the real world 14/09/2018 © The University of Sheffield

Integrity applies to scholarship in general, not just to empirical research The Sheffield Graduate… …and the Sheffield Academic More information: You can crop a picture (trim slices from the side, top or bottom) by selecting on the slide the picture that you want to crop, going to the “format” menu, selecting “picture…” and in the “picture” dialog box clicking the “picture” button. This opens the crop options. The preview button allows you to see whether the crop achieves the effect you wanted. (If you have an old version of PowerPoint these controls may be located differently - refer to the PowerPoint Help menu.) Before importing a picture into your presentation save it in a suitable format (eg jpeg) at a resolution of 72 dots per inch if possible. This resolution keeps the size of the picture file small but still displays fine on screen – particularly important if you’re using several pictures, because half a dozen taken on a five megapixel digital camera and imported at full resolution could mean that your presentation is over 20 megabytes in size. This means it will take up unnecessary disk space, will be slow to open and run on many less powerful computers – and will be too big to e-mail. 14/09/2018 © The University of Sheffield