Funmi Olaitan, Ibadan

Vice Chancellor, Walter Sisulu University, South Africa, Prof. Rob Midgley, has warned researchers against involvement in fraudulent falsification and fabrication of research results.

He said misconducts such as falsification and fabrication of research result and plagiarism completely undermine publication and author's credibility.

He said this while delivering the 70th University of Ibadan Post Graduate School Interdisciplinary research discourse.

While speaking on the topic, "Can We Trust What We Read? Evaluating Quality and Credibility of Research Sources in a Pay-and-Publish Era", he maintained that some quality and integrity issues are trite.  

He said, "While dishonest conduct of course impacts upon the integrity of the final product, honest researchers may also be responsible for producing poor quality research and/ or research that lacks integrity."

Midgley, while quoting InterAcademy Council report published in 2012, said, "Many kinds of irresponsible and undesirable practices are associated with publication. These include both claiming or granting undeserved authorship and denying deserved authorship, manipulating images so as to provide a deceptive impression of research results, repealing publications, publishing results in "least publishable units" to a degree where the novelty of the publication is questionable to maximise the quantity of publications, insufficient acknowledgement of contributors or sponsors, conflicts of interest or bias in reviewing, and appropriating ideas from papers before publication."

He added that researchers have the responsibility of upholding the standards in research works.

"A third point that needs to be emphasised is that the primary responsibility for upholding standards vests in the researcher. Nonetheless, it is also incumbent upon universities and other research institutions to ensure that systems are in place for producing quality research. Good systems inevitably promote research integrity", he said. 

He stated further that institutions have role in ensuring quality assurance and reminding researchers to maintain their ethical duties, stating "institutions certainly have a duty to maintain appropriate quality assurance and ethics procedures and to keep reminding researchers of their ethical duties".