Conference title: “Explaining research misconduct: data, hypotheses, and methodological issues”

Questions related to research integrity and the quality of research outputs are paramount in contemporary debates about science. However, academic investigations about these issues suffer from a global problem.

While the existing literature has identified possible causes of research misconduct, such as pressure to publish or misaligned incentives, there is still a lack of reliable empirical evidence on the relative importance of the identified mechanisms. This lack of credible evidence stems from different reasons. First, while some individual cases are now well-documented, conceptual categories are often recent and derive from texts aimed at developing scientific policies. Second, current empirical studies often focus on particular fields like psychology or the biomedical sciences, and we still lack a global overview of research misconduct across different scientific fields. Third, data are usually rooted in surveys that researchers answer voluntarily by reporting on their own practices, or based on quantitative reviews of retractions. This focus on visible cases probably leaves untouched the vast majority of undisclosed or undetected violations of research integrity.

Overall, it is difficult and costly to get robust and unequivocal data about research integrity problems, and the significance of existing data often remains unclear. In brief, there remains a global discrepancy between the scarcity and reliability of empirical information about scientific misconduct and the wealth of potential factors that may encourage, if not generate this phenomenon. Such uncertainties about the prevalence and causes of research integrity violations are all the more preoccupying as novel academic regulations against such violations keep developing at a brisk pace and may have counter-productive effects if they are based on ill-justified views about the causes of departures from good research practices.

In this context, the purpose of this interdisciplinary conference is to discuss analyses of research integrity violations across scientific fields and the methodological problems related to them. It is open to the different approaches from scholarly fields that analyze science, such as the philosophy, epistemology, sociology, psychology, or economics of science, and to all kinds of scientific methods, be they conceptual, empirical, qualitative, or formal.

Contributions addressing methodological questions related to the causal investigation of integrity violations are specifically welcome.