Postdoctoral Fellow: Understanding scientists' views of good research practice

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

General Audience Summary A post-doctoral research fellow will work under the guidance of the PI to carry out an analysis that will extract key concepts that scientists use to address questions regarding scientific integrity and good scientific practice. The fellow will analyze approximately 2,500 pages of transcribed interviews with scientists who work in academic and collaborative environments about their conceptions of good research practice and values such as applicability, risk, and responsibility. It is important to address these issues since scientists are increasingly compelled to communicate and publicly defend their standards and values regardless of whether they work in a more traditional academic environment or whether they are more strongly committed to commercialized science. The overall goal of this project is to facilitate these communication practices by bringing to light key conceptual tools to express, explain, critique, and defend their methodological standards and their values to different audiences. The results of this project may serve as a preliminary study for more in-depth analyses of communicating good research practice at the interface between science and broader publics. In addition, they will be integrated into undergraduate and graduate course, and they will be shared with other science educators. Technical Summary The post-doctoral fellow will take a bottom-up approach to examine the methodological, epistemic, and ethical values that scientists consider crucial for their research, what attitudes they have toward these values, and what challenges they encounter when they explain their views of good scientific practice to others. The project is both timely and important. Very little is known about how scientists themselves conceptualize their views of good research practice and scientific integrity and about the conceptual challenges they may face in discussions about those issues. The fellow will draw on available interviews to provide numerous empirical examples of how scientists utilize and justify value statements in everyday research. By analyzing their views about collaborations, their merits and potential downsides, and particularly by assessing what motivations scientists identify for collaborative work, it will be possible to refine recent taxonomies of different forms of collaborative practices. In addition, the project will yield more information about what counts as replication in different scientific fields. Most importantly, it will provide deeper insight into the significance that scientists attach to the replication of experiments and to the communication of the outcomes of replications and about how they negotiate tensions between the perceived necessity to replicate findings and the perceived pressure to produce and publish novel and original results.