Scientific Misconduct and Research Integrity

R esearch integrity and a corollary scientific misconduct have received increasing attention in the literature in the last three decades. Most of the research conducted on scientific misconduct has been focused on principal investigators (PIs) and other scientists involved in the research enterprise. By virtue of their position, research coordinators (RCs), many of whom are nurses, are often closest to the research field where much of the misconduct occurs. That is, these are the individuals who manage the large clinical studies. In this role, they negotiate with patients, investigators, and research personnel involved in aspects of the study implementation, including data collection, data management, and interpretation. The experiences of these individuals with breaches in research integrity and scientific misconduct need to be investigated and shared with the larger healthcare community to ensure the safety and well-being of patients enrolled in clinical trials and the accountability of the larger organization for their safety. Scientific endeavors are not undertaken by a single person but rather involve a number of personnel. Two groups of research workers who have been studied independently are investigators and RCs. Although the role of the PI in ensuring the scientific integrity of a study is intuitive, until recently, the critical role played by the RC has not been explicated. The importance of the RC to the day-to-day operations of a study and the overall successful functioning of a research team was well described by Mueller and Mamo (2000) and Fedor and Cola (2003). As a group, RCs hold a unique position in clinical studies and can be expected to be aware of and even influence the scientific integrity with which the research is conceptualized, implemented, and disseminated. However, until recently, little information was available about their values, beliefs, practices, and experiences related to scientific integrity and misconduct. The purposes of this study were to describe experiences reported by RCs as part of a larger study of their beliefs, values, and perceptions of influences on scientific misconduct; to examine how these factors influence their beliefs about reporting practices; and to describe how selected demographic characteristics influence perceptions of scientific misconduct. The quantitative findings related to their beliefs, values, and attitudes and the psychometrics of the survey instrument have been reported elsewhere (Broome, Pryor, Habermann, Pulley, & Kincaid, 2005; Pryor,