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MARK AIRS / GETTY IMAGES
By Jop de Vrieze
The world’s largest multidisciplinary research integrity survey may fall short of its goals after two-thirds of invited institutions refused to collaborate, citing the sensitivity of the topic and fearing negative publicity. This left the researchers conducting the Dutch National Research Integrity Survey on their own to retrieve numerous email addresses and solicit responses. The survey will end on December 7, but the team has collected responses from less than 15% of the 40,000 targeted participants.
“It was supposed to be a collaborative effort, but it ended up becoming a satellite all on its own in the solar system, trying to send signals,” says Gowri Gopalakrishna, postdoctoral researcher at the University Medical Center. Amsterdam coordination of the € 800,000 survey.
Lex Bouter, who studies research methods and integrity at the Free University of Amsterdam (VU), began planning the survey in 2016 to address the lack of data on questionable research practices and scientific misconduct . He wanted to interview all academics who work in the Netherlands not only on the way they conduct their research, but also on work habits, pressures and other aspects of university life. Bouter, former president of VU himself, assured officials of other universities that the investigation would not generate an institutional ranking of bad behavior.
But at a meeting in December 2019, some university presidents argued that an investigation simply would not be suitable for such a sensitive topic, Bouter recalls. Others found the investigation too focused on bad behavior, such as data tampering or selection of outcomes. “I thought it was biased,” says Henk Kummeling, president of the University of Utrecht, who declined to participate. “If you only ask for questionable research practices, you already know what you will get out of the investigation.”
In the end, five of the 15 universities in the Netherlands agreed to collaborate, provided they could have a say in the design and content of the survey. The questionnaire was expanded to include more questions on desirable science practices such as data sharing and open science. After the changes, the presidents of the five participating universities tried unsuccessfully to persuade others to participate.
In a statement sent to ScienceThe president of Leiden University, Carel Stolker, said his institution declined to participate because the survey was methodologically weak, but he did not provide details. Kummeling says his university refused because he “didn’t feel the results would be useful for future policy” but denies it was because of the sensitivity of the subject. “Anything related to integrity is sensitive,” he says. “But I have no problem mapping very clearly what’s going on.”
But according to Gopalakrishna, institutions were worried about bad publicity. “We tried to make the investigation more balanced, but we couldn’t get rid of the negative image,” she says. Jeroen de Ridder, a science philosopher at VU who is not involved in the study, says he is disappointed that a unique opportunity to study research integrity across disciplines may be lost. He denies that the investigation has methodological flaws: “It has become the most careful and in-depth investigation one could wish for,” says de Ridder.
Participating universities assisted Gopalakrishna by providing staff email addresses and sending reminders to complete the questionnaire. To get responses from researchers at the other 10 institutions, Gopalakrishna and his colleagues had to scrape email addresses and send out surveys out of the blue. “This resulted in many more rejected and unopened emails,” she says.
Even some researchers from collaborating institutions, wary of phishing scams, did not open their emails, says UMCA epidemiologist Gerben ter Riet, co-investigator of the investigation. “Researchers are inundated with emails and surveys,” he says. “It’s extremely difficult to stand out with something legitimate.”
As of November 24, 13.3% of researchers affiliated with collaborating institutions had responded to the request, against 9.5% of those from non-collaborating institutions.
After December 7, the team will need to determine the representativeness of the sample. Bouter always expects him to be useful. “I’m a little disappointed with the procedure, but with over 5,000 surveys completed, this is still the largest survey to date.”
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