The Research Ethics Program serves as a resource for the campus community to identify and address ethical challenges intrinsic to the conduct of science, engineering, and other academic scholarship.

Ethics Consultation

Coronavirus Pandemic

There are many ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic is raising new and challenging ethical issues. If you have questions regarding research ethics, clinical ethics, or bioethics, please feel free to contact us and we will do our best to find resources that might help.

 

 

Case of the Month

Dr. Xiong and two of his students were recently pleased to have some of their research accepted for publication in the journal Nature. Unfortunately, two months after the paper was published, it came to Dr. Xiong’s attention that one of the students had falsified the data for a key experiment described in the paper. Dr. Xiong quickly repeated the experiment with the help of the second student and was relieved to see that the finding they had reported was in fact correct.

  • Should Dr. Xiong retract the paper because it is based on falsified research, even though he was able to verify its findings?
  • What if Dr. Xiong discovered that the findings were incorrect, but the work was not falsified?
  • More generally, should publications be retracted if they are found to be wrong?

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