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Teaching Undergraduate Researchers
Responsible Research Conduct

Norma McGavern-Norland and Stephanie J. Bird 

Undergraduates involved in research are not apt to ponder ethical issues in the practice of research. More likely, the students are so happy to have landed a project that concerns about laboratory practice do not even come to mind. Asking questions – especially when others in the laboratory assume you know the answers, and when you are not eager to demonstrate there are things you do not know – is hardly a top priority. Not to mention the feelings of intimidation that overcome many students in their first one-on-one dealings with faculty. If all this was not enough, there is also the fact that at this stage most ethical concerns can seem very remote ("What do questions about data presentation or research funding have to do with me?").

To the extent they do think about it, students assume that they will be treated fairly and that faculty have fully considered the role of the undergraduate student in the lab and the impact of the research experience on other aspects of the student’s education and professional development. After all, they are participating in a well thought-out program, developed by people with plenty of experience. For all these reasons, students tend not to reflect on abstract issues and connect them to daily life in the laboratory – until they come across something that sets them to wondering.

Many questions, many kinds of answers

"Doesn’t the data belong to me, since I’m the one who collected it?" "I think I should be included as an author." "I like to work late at night so I need a key to the lab." It is not surprising that students have such notions. Research experience is learning by doing, and learning laboratory protocols and rules of conduct, like learning research skills, is picked up along the way. It is not even possible to answer every potential question. There are just too many pieces of information and too many kinds of situations. Arguably, the best way of learning appropriate behavior is in situ. Yet we owe our students at least some amount of active guidance and information. Unlike what happens in structured learning situations, instructions for research are not generally handed out. Students need to be aware that problems, including ethical problems, can arise, and they need to be alert to ambiguities. Young researchers, even beginners, may have to make judgments, and need to be reminded to ask questions of their research supervisors whenever they are in doubt.

The Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) has existed at MIT for well over 25 years. Of our 4,400 undergraduates, all but 20 percent will have done UROP work before graduation – a lot of UROPers over the years, working in every imaginable area, from the sciences and engineering disciplines to the arts and social sciences. Along the way they will certainly have learned something about basic laboratory skills, how to search the literature, how to keep a laboratory notebook, how to analyze data, make presentations, troubleshoot equipment, network with other researchers, and so forth. Those who do more than one UROP project (two is typical) will have sampled the methodologies and protocols of different laboratories and even different disciplines.

What the students learn about ethical practice in research is far less certain. Students who participated in UROP "a lot," according to a 1994 survey of seniors, said that their writing skills, public speaking ability, academic self-confidence, and intellectual curiosity had improved significantly, more than among students who had not done undergraduate research. Well and good. But only a third of all the seniors said they felt that their knowledge and abilities regarding "awareness of ethical issues" had improved. Perhaps it is because students are busy doing: learning the details of research techniques and getting the all-important hands-on experience. But we know there is much more to becoming a successful science professional than learning scientific principles and laboratory techniques. It set us thinking about what students expect to learn in their research experience, what we expect of them, and how we might help develop a closer match between the two. The question is, how can we best educate undergraduate researchers about professional standards and ethical values and the conventions of research practice?

Finding answers

Sometimes, of course, answers to questions about how to behave in research really do come from experience, from turning to one’s own conscience. A few years ago, a student doing a UROP project found himself in an interesting situation, and described it in a project evaluation. "At one point," he said, "my program was working according to prediction, but as I was checking over some old code, I noticed that I had made a programming error and my program was not evaluating the correct function, although it was giving great results. I thought to myself, I could just not say anything and let it go, and it would work fine. Or I could say something, and the program would not work anymore." In this case, the answer came from the student himself. "As I thought it over," he went on, "I realized that this wasn’t a game or a problem set where you can cover up your path as long as the answer works in the end. Here you are potentially dealing with major aspects of other people’s lives, so everything should be right. Basic research is not something to fudge."

Not all answers can come from self-questioning. Problems often arise as the result of a simple lack of information. A UROP staff member remembers a dispute between an undergraduate researcher and a graduate student colleague. The undergraduate student was leaving the project and took his lab notebook with him. His supervisor and the graduate student were seriously worried about the missing notebook. The student would not give it back. "It’s my lab notebook," he said. He did not realize – and no one had told him – that although he could make a copy, lab notebooks belong to the project. This misunderstanding is only a few steps removed from the student in a course with a lab component who regularly erased data she was taking from experiments and rewrote the data on clean pages because it "looked neater" that way. Clear guidelines to beginning researchers, explanations by supervisors about research protocols, and even a little bit of experience can clear the air about misunderstandings.

Make sure, we consistently tell students, that before you start you know what your research is all about. What, specifically, do you think you’re going to do? How will you go about it? How does this work relate to other work in the field? Asking questions can be hard, so it helps that students are required to write up their research plan before they can earn credit or pay, and that this description has to be approved by the faculty supervisor and the department’s UROP coordinator. If students are not able to describe their planned research, we expect them to ask questions until they do know enough to convince us that they know what they are doing. Students working for pay will have to find out which charges to a research account are allowable, and which are not. They will have to find out who assumes responsibility for their supervision when their supervisor is away, and who signs their weekly timecard.

Soon after starting, new researchers will have to find out what the conventions or rules are in their field of research, and how they might be different from rules they have experienced in other laboratories or disciplines. Some questions have clearer answers than others. Information and resources regarding standard practices and regulations governing patent rights, copyrights, the care of laboratory animals, and the use of humans as experimental subjects can be looked up in our undergraduate research directory. The more complex questions are tied to situations beginners have not yet experienced. Issues like criteria for authorship, techniques for data selection and presentation, and proper acknowledgment of sources sometimes present no obvious resolution. Where there is a range of accepted practices within the discipline and there is no single correct approach, helping students to figure out the answers to these kinds of problems may be a real challenge.

Bringing together issues and situations

There are several approaches we can take to promote discussion and facilitate the education of undergraduates about conventions and professional standards of behavior. First, UROP has a recently revised informational brochure called What to Expect, and What’s Expected of You? that identifies issues and aspects of research practice about which students may want or need specific information. It also provides suggestions about how they might find this information. The brochure will be given to all beginning UROPers. Second, this IAP we held the first of what we hope will be a series of facilitated discussions between faculty and students about responsible research conduct. Our January Mentoring Program which brings together experienced UROPers and beginning UROP students also offers an opportunity to introduce new UROPers to issues of research practice.

Our goals are to: (1) increase awareness and knowledge of professional standards; (2) increase awareness of the ethical dimensions of science; (3) provide individuals with experience in making and defending decisions about ethical issues that arise in research; and (4) teach individuals when and how to gather resources for making decisions.

During IAP in January, UROP and the Provost’s Office jointly sponsored an event for UROP students and faculty on the general topic of responsible behavior in research with a focus on issues most relevant to undergraduate researchers. A short scenario based on situations and issues that researchers might actually experience or witness was used to catalyze discussion.

Ownership of data. In our UROP brochure we tell students to find out early in their project who will retain custody of primary, original data, gathered in the field or in the laboratory. We tell them never to destroy primary, original data, no matter how rough its form, in part because colleagues and other readers of published results may raise questions that can only be answered by referring to such data. Students should also be aware that "ownership" can be an ambiguous term. How free can one be discussing someone else’s research?

A scenario called Busman’s Holiday [Prepared by Eve K. Nichols and Stephanie J. Bird] describes the following situation: two students, John and Bill, friends in college and now graduate students on two different coasts, meet at a Christmas party in their home town. They exchange stories about their college experiences and the research projects they are working on at their respective schools. It turns out that John is working in a research area closely related to that of a lab in the same department Bill is in. Fascinated by this coincidence they start comparing notes, and end up talking about approaches scientists in each of the labs are taking. After John describes some new work in his laboratory, Bill starts to describe the latest development he has heard about when he suddenly remembers how sensitive the other researcher is about sharing his data, recalling how he once said he was afraid of being "scooped." Bill says, "I don’t know how he’d feel about my talking about this." It’s an awkward moment. John changes the subject. Questions remain for Bill. Did he do something he shouldn’t have done? Should he mention anything about his conversation with his friend John, and what the other lab is doing when he gets back to his research group?

Acknowledgment of sources. Undergraduates struggle with issues that relate to acknowledgment of sources. Many students’ sense of what it means to give credit to others begins and ends with citing a direct quotation. Proper acknowledgment in research, we remind students, extends to articles, books, and conversation. We suggest they ask their research supervisors about quoting and paraphrasing sources of information. It is helpful for students to understand that faculty, too, face acknowledgment issues.

A second scenario [Tenure Track scenario © Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, prepared by Eve K. Nichols, with assistance from Profs. Gerald R. Fink, Lawrence E. Susskind, and Robert Weinberg] lets students hear how faculty might discuss an important issue: Assistant Professor Dick Matthews is close to receiving tenure. In a discussion with his department head he hears his recent article praised, "You took a problem that has plagued the field for 10 years and turned it around so that everyone can see the solution." He responds, "It means a lot to hear you say that. I’m not sure where the idea came from myself...I started doodling and suddenly I knew what the problem was. When I went back to the bench the answer was clear." Is that really what happened? Later, Matthews’ graduate student gives him the name of a Canadian journal article that seems, she says, "vaguely related" to Matthews’ research. Matthews reads it and is shocked. It lays out the ideas that appear in his paper. Talking about this with an assistant professor friend, he tells him he had met the author at a symposium two years earlier, but neither he nor anyone in the lab normally reads this particular journal so he never saw the article. He feels sure he developed his ideas independently, but fears if he withdraws his paper now it will jeopardize the tenure decision. His friend suggests that instead of withdrawing the paper he acknowledge the author’s work. The next day, when his graduate student asks if he had time to read the article, Matthews replies, "No, it probably didn’t relate much to what we’re doing." The scenario sets the stage for a discussion of where ideas come from, intellectual property issues, professional relationships, and aspects of mentorship.

Authorship. Quite a few MIT undergraduates end up with their names on published papers, some even as first authors. Since students who have been working for a year or more on a single research project know that co-authorship might be possible, they have many questions about authorship criteria. Undergraduate contributions to a piece of work are weighed by the same standard as any other contribution from the research group. Not all undergraduates understand that, however, and some worry they are missing out on being a co-author not because their contribution was minor, but because they are undergraduates. UROP suggests they find out about co-authorship criteria in their research group. If they are going to be writing a paper that has multiple authors, they need to verify which part of the manuscript falls within their jurisdiction, and which author is designated as the party responsible for the entire manuscript. Given the wide range of accepted practices regarding authorship within and across disciplines, we do not attempt to explain how authorship operates, however.

In another scenario [Late One Night scenario ©Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, prepared by Eve K. Nichols with assistance from Profs. Gerald R. Fink, Lawrence E. Susskind, and Robert Weinberg] Sandra Dunn, a post-doc working with a research group that includes Professor Barbara Steel and graduate student John Palant, has told John that she had an idea that might help him in his work to find the co-activator for his DNA binding protein, his thesis project. The next day at a group meeting John asks her what she has found, but she responds that she had been wrong, and he should forget about it. Sandra does not appear in the lab for several days. When she does appear the following week in Professor Steel’s office she explains she has solved John’s problem and needs just one more experiment to confirm the results. She has also drafted two papers. She put John’s name on the first because she began with his technique. But his name is not on the second. She explains, "The second paper on the co-activator and its implications for all regulation is mine." Professor Steel suggests that she reconsider. "I like to think we all work together in this lab." Then she adds, "Have you shown these papers to John yet?" "No," Sandra answers, "I thought I’d present them at group meeting tomorrow. What do you think?" Discussion of this scenario provides an opportunity to consider to what extent students would do things differently if they, like Sandra, had solved John’s problem, and to explore the criteria for (and responsibilities of) authorship, laboratory relationships, professional advancement, mentorship, and other relevant topics.

Taking it from here

No single discussion or brochure can in itself alter undergraduates’ understanding of research practice. What we can do is raise the general level of awareness, at least for a time. In the process of developing the What to Expect brochure, we realized that we have a responsibility to teach our students about ethical practice in the course of monitoring UROP. Several academic departments and individual faculty offer special seminars to prepare students for research. These are excellent opportunities to make students aware that there is more to learn about research than technical skills. In the long term we can provide information and offer occasional forums to discuss research practice. Faculty need to be reminded from time to time that young researchers have gaps in knowledge and experience. We must encourage undergraduates to ask questions, and help them sort out misunderstandings. Sometimes we have to remind them that one of the most valuable experiences in their education can be learning from their mistakes.

This article was adapted from an article prepared for the journal Council on Undergraduate Research Quarterly, published March 1998.

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