Page 61 - Academic and Research Book_WEB

misrepresent the participants or the community. The researcher must also not deliberately visualize
data that is not representative, for example, including different time periods on the same line chart to
show a sharper change than the reality.

Research Misconduct and Obfuscation

Fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism in the conduct and reporting of research is termed research
misconduct. Fabrication means making up data; falsification is manipulating information or research
material or omitting data to misrepresent research to suit some purpose; and plagiarism is borrowing
or appropriating another person’s ideas, words, writings, without acknowledging.

Obfuscation is to hide information or twist findings, deliberately or otherwise, by using writing styles
that are deliberately confusing.

Research misconduct is a serious offence and is a punishable offence in many academic institutions or
at least attracts a reprimand.

The UGC Research Development and Innovation Programs Implementation Guidelines (UGC, 2017,
op. cit.) say:

Research misconduct includes deliberate fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism in proposing, per-
forming, and reviewing research, or in reporting research results, and harmful activities. (p. 25)

Urging universities to formulate a policy on research misconduct, the document states that such codes
must be based on principles of fairness and expedience. If such misconduct is reported the institution
must examine the complaint and adjudicate.

Box 3

Research Ethics Committee (REC)/Institutional Ethics Review Committee (IEC)

The growing institutionalization of ethics committees and the process of mandatory ethics
review in the social sciences has several critics who believe that adopting a process developed
for and suited to biomedical research is not helpful to the social science community in its
search to codify ethics in the disciplines. However, the trend towards systematic ethical review
is advancing rapidly.

RECs are committees that review all research undertaken by an institution to examine the
ethical dimensions of the research. Typically, all research is submitted to the Committee
at all stages: the proposal, the research design; data collection design; after data collection;
after analysis of data; final report. It examines these submissions to ensure that the rights of
participants have not been violated and that they have not been harmed.

“Good ethics review requires sensitivity to the context in which a research study will be
conducted, and good ethics reasoning requires careful thought and consideration,” to cite the
Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) website.

Ethics review also examines whether researchers have been afforded safety and security during
the course of their work.
Ethics review should be seen as part of research design, execution, and dissemination and
should not be regarded as a mandatory, but bothersome process.

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