Doctoral forums on research integrity change the course of PhDs

Doctoral forums conducted during international conferences on research integrity around the world have been changing the course of research work undertaken by PhD students, and positively influencing the quality of work done as well as its focus.

The forums have also provided early career researchers and doctoral students with important feedback, enabling them successfully to complete their research projects on the not-so-common subject of research integrity.

Now an important feature of the biennial World Conferences on Research Integrity (WCRI), the doctoral events have contributed to a growing and important pool of experts in research integrity, a subject that is becoming increasingly critical in the world of research.

Dating back to 2015 the forums have, importantly, provided students with an opportunity to interact with panels made up of experienced researchers including professors, away from their supervisors, and this has been positively influencing the postgraduates’ research projects.

During the past five forums, students with the best research projects have also received cash awards, incentivising them to undertake more impactful research work.

As a result, beneficiaries are calling for their expansion, an increase in the frequency of doctoral forums as well as for more activities, to make the events more sustainable and more visible, hence more impactful, in expanding research integrity as an important field of study.

Charting the future

“We need to chart the future direction of the doctoral forums, perhaps seek new allies and find ways of staying together too as past participants and beneficiaries,” said Tamarinde Haven, an assistant professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

One way of ensuring that the events have a lasting legacy would be to form a fellows association, which would help both to keep the events alive and to champion the place and importance of research integrity in the world of scientific research, she told a session at the 8th World Conference on Research Integrity, held from 2-5 June 2024 in Athens, Greece.

Haven, who moderated the 2022 doctoral forum, noted that awardees she had closely observed over the past five doctoral forums had evidently “inspired researchers worldwide”, influenced institutional policies and guidelines, and had fostered strong networks and collaborations.

Among other things, postgraduate students had published work on the variety of ways research integrity is taught and practised in Europe, “which resonated with a lot of other European Commission funded projects that further professionalised education and educational policy in the field of research integrity”.

Postgraduates had also investigated retractions, their frequency and their impact, she told the session on “A snapshot of knowledge on research integrity from research presented in the doctoral forum of the world conferences: A bird’s eye view on the findings”.

At the moment, Haven said, there was a need to incentivise researchers to look further into research integrity and to professionalise training in the field.

Out in the cold

According to Rita Faria, an assistant professor in the faculty of law of at the University of Porto in Portugal, who took part in the 2015 doctoral gathering, the event presented a great opportunity for fellows to receive “honest and interesting” feedback from panellists.

Faria won a cash award for her research proposal on “research in criminology”, considered an exotic topic, for “creative and critical use of theory for understanding research behaviour”.

She said she had “caused a commotion at her university”.

This is because she had no peers in the more common field of criminology with whom to discuss and debate her topic, or from the research integrity community who wondered why she had opted to study research misconduct when more importance was being attached to fostering integrity.

“There were also questions over where to publish my work, [and] how to choose jurors for the PhD defence. All these were the consequences for a junior scholar of studying an unwelcomed topic,” she remembered.

Nevertheless, Faria persisted, focusing her doctoral study on research misconduct as an occupational crime or deviance by professionals in the course of their work, even as more questions arose over why she chose a topic that could potentially end her career.

“While my subject was seen as too niche, it was also ground-breaking. It was my favourite subject, and it will continue to be so. I would ask everybody to stick to their favourite topic even when it is not common,” she said.

It was all worth it. Faria has been invited to sit on various boards and panels, and to write for special journal issues, and maintains close contacts with the “very few who had studied such topics”.

“Research misconduct is a white-collar crime, a form of occupational crime worth studying as with any other type of fraud or misconduct committed by professionals due to their legitimate occupations,” Faria declared.

Powerful research feedback

According to Francis Kombe, a PhD student at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa and CEO of the African research ethics organisation EthiXPERT, who took part in the 6th WCRI in Hong Kong, the doctoral forum changed the focus of his research project after he shared his PhD proposal on research ethics.

“The forum presented a great opportunity because I was at the start of the project and was looking for ethical approvals. I proposed to focus on three African countries and got the most important feedback: I was advised to either go wide or go deep.

“The powerful feedback I got is that I was going too wide, but it was not possible to cover everything in a PhD research project. In the end I reduced the number of countries to two and the number of institutions I was to look at as well,” added Kombe, who went on to win a cash award from the event for his proposal.

Another awardee, Sonia Vasconcelos from the science education programme at the Institute of Medical Biochemistry Leopoldo de Meis Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, said doctoral forums are especially important in a rarefied field such as research integrity. The research groups are small and scattered around the world.

The forums present an opportunity for doctoral students to set up contacts with other students at the same stage as themselves. This is especially valuable because doctoral students in research integrity rarely get a chance to interact with experienced researchers in the field, she said.

To keep the forums active and to make them more relevant, more follow-up activities in between the world conferences are needed. This would also give the PhD discourses more visibility.