Research Integrity: A Market Overview By Samantha Green (Head of Content Marketing, Morressier) <samantha.green@morressier.com> and Sami Benchekroun (CEO, Morressier) <sami.benchekroun@morressier.com>
Introduction: The Unique Challenge of Research Integrity Issues of research integrity are ultimately issues of trust. Scientists need their work to be trusted in order to advance their careers, and to ensure their work has a broader societal impact. Publishers need the work they curate to be trusted to maintain their brand and ensure they can continue to pursue revenue and partnerships. Universities and institutions, many of whom now have Research Integrity Offices, also need to safeguard their reputation through the integrity of their researchers. Journal editors and reviewers work to maintain the impact of their publications, so do their best to ensure each piece of research upholds the highest standards, with the help of best practices and guidelines from organizations like The Committee on Publishing Ethics. Institutions, editorial teams, technology organizations, publishers, and more all play a role in improving research integrity. Those roles are under ever more pressure as the landscape of scholarly publishing changes faster and faster. On top of the complexities of the market, and the different drivers for individual researchers, publishers, institutions, and technology organizations, we need to understand the root drivers of research misconduct in order to properly build solutions. Research integrity issues become exacerbated when the system is under strain, as it is now with each year seeing a vast increase in submissions and a dwindling pool of reviewers, who often serve as one of the few checks and balances in the publishing process. Strains on the system lead to embarrassing retractions or slower publishing times, which diminish the impact and reputation of science in the public eye. The calls for change in publishing workflows and peer review come from all corners. The system does not work for reviewers, who spend huge amounts of time reviewing work with little credit or recognition. It does not work for editors or publishers, who invest resources on managing complicated processes that might be manual or not well integrated into the rest of their workflows. And it does not work for authors, who are under pressure to publish and have to wait for slow processes that prevent them from sharing their work efficiently. Increasingly, it also does not work for funders, who want the discoveries they’ve invested in shared the moment they are finished.
The Urgent Need To Scale Research output has grown significantly year over year, scaling up to an incredible degree during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially. As a result, the publishing industry needs to be able to address this increase in volume, and identify research fraud and misconduct at scale. Before exploring the role of technology to address research integrity, we must establish what has led to our currently strained publishing resources. Research misconduct happens when a system is under pressure. There are limited resources, and a constant call to do things faster. On the part of the researcher, they face immense pressure to publish, in order to
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advance their careers and build their personal reputation. This pressure leaves them vulnerable to paper mills and predatory journals, and perhaps more likely to cut corners by engaging in misconduct themselves, or simply making a mistake because there’s little time to perfect a paper. Within our publishing and peer review workflows, there are issues of scale and a pressure to review more papers, faster in an article-based economy. When there’s less time to review each paper, there’s less time to evaluate and identify mistakes or issues that would make a piece of research unsuitable for publication. The entanglement of business drivers, in which more papers leads to more profit, and reputational drivers, in which publishing papers advances an individual’s career, creates a perfect storm in which individuals and institutions might be tempted to sacrifice accuracy and quality for the sake of scale. The issue of scale is where technology can have a true impact on scholarly publishing. Building modern, lightweight tools that add a protective layer of assessment for research misconduct will allow publishers to focus on curating the highest quality research at a significantly higher volume, with the confidence that their techstack is supporting their mission to improve research integrity.
The Role of Technology Technology vendors have a powerful role to play in driving research integrity and supporting publishers’ efforts to detect and prevent common forms of fraud. Technology is uniquely positioned to detect many forms of research misconduct, including: 1) Plagiarism — Plagiarism can take many forms, from taking someone else’s ideas to copying their words without proper attribution. Software can efficiently scan potential research papers against massive databases of web pages and published works to identify areas with too much similarity. 2) Data fabrication — Whether intentional or accidental, the misrepresentation of data is the most common type of research fraud. Data fabrication can be uncovered with algorithms to analyze datasets in submitted works and create statistical models that check for errors and inconsistencies. 3) Analysis errors — Similar to data fabrication, errors can occur during the analysis or results section of a published article. Identifying those anomalies requires a series of automated tests for inconsistencies in statistical analysis. 4) Ethical violations — Ethical violations within a paper can include the manipulation of citations or an overabundance of self-citation. Software can review
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