Research Ethics There are three main sources of ethics

Concentrating
Concentratingon on
1. Philosophy and religion
guidelines
guidelinesfor
for
Based on material by Peter Eades, Alan Fekete, Judy Kay 2. The law ethical research
ethical research
3. Professional guidelines

Aside:
• Discussion of research ethics without considering
these sources is pointless.
• Amateur ethicists are dangerous
• Research ethics is a not a private belief system

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1. Philosophy and religion

Professional guidelines

The law
Professional guidelines

Philosophy and religion

The law

Philosophy and religion

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 1. Philosophy and religion Philosophy and religion: Utilitarianism

• There are two main themes in Western ethics:

ƒ In many western countries, the currently
a) Stuart-Mill’s utilitarianism: "the greatest good for the
dominant ethical philosophy is utilitarianism:-
greatest number of people" .
b) Kant’s deontological ethics: “an action is morally right is ¾Ethics aims to guide people’s actions in
the will, or motive of person doing it”. such a way as to produce a better world.
• Western scientific ethics is derived from both. ¾Actions are good if they have good
consequences
¾Actions are based on the “greatest good
for the greatest number of people”.
Utilitarianism Deontological ethics

Utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism: the

Philosophy and religion goodness of an action is determined from its
consequences.
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Philosophy and religion: Deontological ethics

Utilitarianism ideas
ƒ Acts are good or bad irrespective of the consequences of the
• Bentham (around 1800) act. Deontological ethics is the opposite of consequentialist
ethics.
¾ act for greatest pleasure for the greatest number of people

ƒ Ethics can be based on a set of rules that apply irrespective of

• John Stuart Mill (mid 1800s) the consequences
¾ Act for the greatest happiness, rather than the greatest pleasure ¾ For example, you should tell the truth, even if it leads to
¾ There are different kinds of happiness, some are more important harm.
than others
ƒ Acts are required, forbidden, or permitted by rules
• Arrow (20th century)
¾ measure the good by people’s preferences ƒ Many religions have deontological aspects
¾ “Follow the laws of God”

• Popper and others (20th century)

¾ aim to minimize pain rather than maximize happiness

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 The law
ƒ The main laws relevant to computer science
2. The law
researchers are Intellectual Property laws
ƒ These laws are very important for industrial research.
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Patents Copyright Trademarks Trade secrets

Professional guidelines

The law Japanese Law USA Law others

Philosophy and religion

The law

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3. Professional guidelines 3. Professional guidelines

Written guidelines on ethics are available from

ƒ Every University
ƒ Every Government research laboratory
ƒ ACM code of practice
ƒ ACS code of practice
Professional guidelines
These cover a wide range of ethical problems that might occur in
industry and research.

The law

Philosophy and religion

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Sources:
Australian Vice Chancellor’s Committee (AVCC) The main issues for research students in IT
http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/_files_nhmrc/file/publications/synopses/r39.pdf
¾ Research oriented Three top ethical issues:
¾ Common to all Australian Universities a) Authorship: who should be the author of a paper?
b) Recirculation, or self-plagiarism: writing the same paper twice.
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) c) Omission: failing to say something relevant.
http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics
¾ Relatively general All three are discussed in AVCC and University policies, procedures,
and guidelines.
Australian Computer Society (ACS)
http://www.acs.org.au/documents/codes/CodeofProfConductPractice.pdf
¾ Oriented toward the IT profession

USYD Office of Ethics administration

http://www.usyd.edu.au/ethics/human/general_information/
¾ Human ethics
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Professional guidelines relevant to Computer Science research students: Professional guidelines relevant to Computer Science research students:

1. Guidelines 1. Guidelines
¾ Summary of University guidelines ¾ Summary of University guidelines

2. University processes for dealing with scientific misconduct 2. University processes for dealing with scientific misconduct
¾ Mostly a summary of University of Sydney procedures ¾ Mostly a summary of University of Sydney procedures

3. What happens in practice? 3. What happens in practice?

¾ Some of my observations and advice ¾ Some of my observations and advice

4. Advice (from Alan Fekete et al.) 4. Advice (from Alan Fekete et al.)

5. Some scenarios 5. Some scenarios

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 General
Data storage
General principles ƒ Data used in experiments must be stored
ƒ Must be preserve privacy as defined by an Australian
Researchers must maintain: Standard
ƒ High Standards ƒ Minimum 5 years
ƒ Discipline-specific ethics ƒ Should be stored in the institution as well as with the
ƒ Workplace safety researcher
ƒ Confidentiality (e.g., in questionnaires from humans) ƒ If you publish a paper based on some data, then you
should make the data available to other researchers on
demand
Research results should be open to scrutiny by peer review.
(Secrecy is possible, but only for a limited time)

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Authorship Authorship

Authorship is substantial participation, including: Authorship is not

• Conception and design, or analysis of data; and
• Drafting/revising the paper; and
• Final approval of the version to be published.
An author's role must be sufficient for that person to take public
responsibility for at least part of the paper.
• Helping to get funding for the project
• The collection of data
• General supervision of the research group

¾ “Honorary authorship” is not acceptable.

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 Authorship
Authorship
Co-authors
• Early in the project, discuss who will be an author
All people qualified to be authors should be authors
• One of the co-authors should be assigned to keep records
• Everyone who is allowed to be an author should be (of experiments etc), and formally accept responsibility for
an author, as long as he/she agrees. the entire paper.
• Authors should sign an authorship statement
• This statement should be kept on file in the institute
• All authors should agree to being an author

Non-authors who have contributed (e.g., funding) should be

acknowledged

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More guidelines about publications

Plagiarism/Recirculation
• Private publication (non-reviewed) is OK, but you should
Recirculation, or self-plagiarism explicitly say that it has not been reviewed
ƒ Publication of multiple papers based on the same data is not
acceptable except where there is full cross-referencing
within the papers • You must acknowledge the sources of financial support
ƒ Before you submit two similar papers, you should tell both (as a declaration of possible conflict of interest)
editors/publishers
ƒ Always cite previous papers that you have written with a • Publishing lies is not allowed
similar theme/content
ƒ As a rule of thumb, don’t copy-and-paste anything except
some parts of the introduction

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Omission
ƒ You should not omit to say something significant
¾ Obvious example: suppose that your algorithm is
derived from an algorithm by person X. Then you
should say so in your paper.
¾ There are many more subtle examples.
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Conflict of interest (USyd guidelines)
Money
If you will gain financially from some research, then you
should say so in the publications etc.
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Supervision
Your supervisors should
• Be well qualified
• Have a reasonable staff/student ratio
• Give you ethics guidance
• Ensure (as far as possible) the validity of the data
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Conflict of interest (ACM/IEEE etc guidelines)
Refereeing
You cannot referee a paper if you have a conflict of interest with one
of the authors.
A conflict of interest defined for ACM/IEEE conferences as any
situation where you don't feel that you can make an objective
assessment, including:
ƒ you are a co-author
ƒ one of your current or former students is a co-author
ƒ your supervisor / former supervisor is a co-author
ƒ a colleague from your current institution is a co-author
ƒ a colleague who you have worked with on a research project
in the past 5 years is a co-author
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Professional guidelines relevant to Computer Science research students:
University processes for dealing with research misconduct
1. Guidelines
¾ Summary of University guidelines
ƒ Scientific misconduct = “fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, or
other unacceptable practices” (USyd procedures)
2. University processes for dealing with scientific misconduct
¾ Mostly a summary of University of Sydney procedures ƒ For example:
¾ misleading ascription of authorship:
3. What happens in practice? • listing of authors without their permission
¾ Some of my observations and advice • attributing work to others who have not in fact contributed
to the research
4. Advice (from Alan Fekete et al.) • lack of appropriate acknowledgment of work primarily
produced by someone else
5. Some scenarios
ƒ It does not include honest errors or honest differences in
interpretation

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Misconduct #1: Misappropriation

Misconduct #2: Interference
You should not:
You should not:
ƒ Plagiarize (present of the words or ideas of another as ƒ damage any research-related property of another
his or her own, without reference)

ƒ Use information in breach of confidentiality associated

with the review of a manuscript or grant application

ƒ Omit reference to the relevant published work of others

for the purpose of inferring personal discovery

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 Misconduct #3: Misrepresentation
What happens if someone breaks the
guidelines / code of ethical behaviour?
You should not:

ƒ Tell lies

ƒ Omit to say something significant

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Professional guidelines relevant to Computer Science research students:

University of Sydney process for research misconduct
1. Guidelines
¾ Summary of University guidelines
1. Someone makes an allegation

2. University processes for dealing with scientific misconduct

2. It is investigated locally, to see whether it is serious.
¾ Mostly a summary of University of Sydney procedures
¾ Research misconduct is always serious
¾ Breaches of the guidelines are not always serious
3. What happens in practice?
¾ Some observations and advice (from Peter Eades)
3. If it is serious, then the matter is referred up the chain, to a series
of committees
¾ At the top, the committee can be external 4. Advice (from Alan Fekete et al.)

5. Some scenarios
How does it work in practice? … … … Æ

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 Observations Conduct correct research

ƒ Research students want:

• Be explicit about the evidence for your claims
¾ To advertise their research as widely as possible
¾ To write as many papers as possible • Be open and clear about limits or weaknesses of your work
¾ To become rich and/or famous

ƒ Research is competitive

ƒ These things tempt the students to ignore research ethics

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Respect sources of data

Truth in research
ƒ People who were used for experiments (eg usability)
1. If you say you built a system, it must exist ¾ Read the HCI ethics guidelines
¾ Get ethics approval from the ethics committee
2. If you state experimental results, they must be real and fair
ƒ Describe the environment in enough detail (eg was there other ƒ People/organisations that provided information, equipment,
load, were the caches pre-filled, what hardware/software was funding etc
used)
¾ Licence conditions
¾ Non-disclosure agreements
3. Data must be representative
¾ Possible approval process
ƒ Don’t pick the most positive examples from several attempts
ƒ Don’t reason circularly (ie don’t use data to derive a hypothesis,
or to determine key parameter values, and later claim the same
data as evidence)
¾ Instead, have separate pilot set and evaluation set

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Authorship and acknowledgement
Multiple submission/ recirculation/ self plagiarism
Advice:
ƒ It is a difficult issue
¾ Multiple submission is bad
¾ Always ensure that every author on the paper explicitly ¾ But two papers can be close to each other, as long as each
agrees to be an author has a distinct contribution, and you explain what that is
• Eg one paper describes system architecture, another
¾ Always be generous in inviting authorship from those who presents network optimisation, another shows innovative
have contributed UI
• conceiving, executing or interpreting part of the research
ƒ Cross-reference all the other work in each publication
¾ Don’t be insulted if someone declines to be an author
ƒ Rule of thumb: “Introduction” may be assisted by copy-paste, but
no other part of the paper should be created by copy-paste
¾ Always acknowledge generously
• Funding sources ƒ Ask your supervisor if in doubt
• People with whom you have had significant discussions
• Generously reference as many relevant papers as ƒ Multiple submission makes people mistrust you; trust between
possible researchers is very important

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Omission
Plagiarism

Advice and observations:

Advice:

¾ Omission is unfortunately common, and very difficult to

¾ Always acknowledge and reference generously prevent. For example:
• “straw man” comparisons
¾ Never quote without quote marks • When the results did not go as you expected, the
experiment is not reported
¾ Never cut-and-paste from someone else’s work
¾ If you keep rigorously honest, then people will trust you
¾ If you use someone’s figures/pictures, ask their more
permission first.
• If they do not give permission, then try to use Rule of thumb: Always be open and clear about limits or
alternative pictures weaknesses of your work
• If they do give permission, then acknowledge them
fully in the figure caption

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 Protect yourself
Protect yourself
Issues with referees, acquaintances, web surfers
Conflict with supervisor
ƒ Can occur during thesis (eg over funding, co-authorship, ƒ Not everyone is ethical
commercialisation, etc) ¾ People who see your work before publication might
¾ Best if issues discussed before work starts publish it themselves, or improve on it
¾ If necessary, approach School research director (Dr ¾ This can restrict your recognition
Masa Takatsuka)
ƒ Best protection is time-stamped publication (eg School
Tech Report)
¾ Before putting on web or submitting or sending out for
comment
¾ Remember that it is not peer reviewed at this stage

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Professional guidelines relevant to Computer Science research students:

University processes for misconduct, in practice
1. Guidelines
¾ Summary of University guidelines
• The sinner is warned and the warning is stored in a file.

2. University processes for dealing with scientific misconduct

• Bad offences, and repeat offences, result in:
¾ Mostly a summary of University of Sydney procedures
¾ Students being thrown out
¾ Supervisors being fired / forced to resign
(sometimes because their students were involved in 3. What happens in practice?
research misconduct) ¾ Some of my observations and advice
¾ Legal action
4. Some scenarios

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Scenario: Millicent and Mutter, with Dingle
1. An honours student, Millicent, writes a brilliant thesis on simplifying
agent-oriented concept design (AOCD).
2. His supervisor, Professor Mutter, sees that it is brilliant and turns it
into a joint paper, which is accepted to the rank A conference
AOS2011.
3. Millicent gets first class honours and goes to work in SAAB in
Sweden.
4. Professor Mutter presents the joint paper at AOS2011 in Tokyo.
5. Professor Dingle from Ohio State University sends an email to
Professor Mutter pointing out that the brilliant simplification of AOCD
was all in a paper that Dingle published in 2005. She accuses Mutter
of plagiarism.
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Scenario: Robbie and the Rapid Router
1. Robbie has a new routing algorithm RR that he thinks is faster than
previous algorithms.
2. There are some published benchmark data sets for this kind of
routing.
3. RR is a randomised algorithm (eg, genetic algorithm) that gives a
different result every time you run it.
4. Robbie runs RR on the benchmark 1000 times, and finds that the
average runtime is 231.1ms; while the maximum runtime is 1451.7ms
and the minimum is 62.1 ms.
5. The best previous result on this benchmark used 81.3ms.
6. Robbie submits a paper reporting that his new algorithm is better
than previous algorithms because it ran on the benchmark in 62.1ms.
7. ….?
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Scenario: Millicent and Mutter, with Dingle (cont.)
6. Mutter checks Millicent’s thesis against Dingle’s paper and finds that
large sections have been copied, word for word; Mutter apologizes to
Dingle.
7. Mutter writes to his dean and asks that Millicent’s honours degree be
rescinded.
8. The dean accuses Mutter of plagiarism.
9. The case works its way up the University disciplinary system.
10. The university offers Mutter a choice: accept a demotion to Associate
Professor, or resign.
11. Mutter resigns.
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Scenario: Bertie, Bogie and his wife
1. Bertie, the departmental director of research, does not like Associate
Professor Bogie.
2. Bertie notes that Bogie has written a joint paper with his wife, who is
a student at a different University.
3. Bertie begins to look through Bogie’s many papers and finds three
papers which are almost the same. They are published at three
different conferences.
4. In the meantime, Bogie accepts a job as Professor at a different
University.
5. Bertie writes to the director of research at Bertie’s University, pointing
out that at least three papers of Bogie are virtually the same.
6. … ?
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Scenario: Ellen and the middle-aged Miles
1. A PhD student, Ellen, goes to a conference, and gives a talk.
2. After the talk, a middle-aged respectable professor (called Miles) asks
Ellen lots of questions, and asks her about her future directions.
3. Ellen tells him everything; she is very happy that Professor Miles is
interested in her work.
4. Miles is ambitious, but he has only published two papers in the last three
years.
5. Six months later, Miles publishes a paper which has all the stuff that that
he and Ellen discussed.
6. The paper has no acknowledgement to Ellen.
7. …?
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Scenario: Banbury, Brightwistle and the X-Rays
1. A PhD student, Banbury, invents a wobbly algorithm and applies it to
1996 chest X-ray data from Wentworth.
2. He publishes the paper in WOBBLY2004, claiming that it is better
than the 2003 wobbly algorithm of Brightwhistle and Scott.
3. Brightwhistle gets annoyed, because she thinks her algorithm is the
best.
4. Brightwhistle wants to test her 2003 algorithm on the 1996 chest X-
ray data from Wentworth, and asks Banbury for the data.
5. Banbury replies that he spent half his grant extracting the data from
the database, and if Brightwhistle wants the data, then she can get it
herself.
6. … ?
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Scenario: Kathleen and Mabel, with Malmsbury error detection
1. A PhD student, Kathleen, is writing a paper for a conference (in
Colorado) and discusses it a lot.
2. Mabel has a great idea that would fit right in Kathleen’s paper.
3. Kathleen and Mabel chat and agree to include Mabel’s idea; also to
include Mabel as an author.
4. The paper is accepted, and presented at the conference by Mabel
(Kathleen is in Norway at another conference).
5. At the conference, Professor Marmsbury sees a critical error in the
paper.
6. Mabel says “It’s really not my paper, Kathleen wrote it, it’s her error”.
7. … ?
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Scenario: Formby and the googly algorithm
1. A PhD student, Formby, invents a googly algorithm and applies it to
1996 chest X-ray data from Wentworth.
2. The algorithm runs well on this data.
3. He publishes the paper in GOOGLY2004
4. Section 5 of the paper is “Evaluation”, based on the 1996 Wentworth
chest X-ray data.
5. A year later, Formby is depressed because he hasn’t discovered any
new googly algorithms for a while.
6. He applies his original googly algorithm to 1997 chest X-ray data
from Billingworth.
7. He submits a paper in GOOGLY2005, same as the 2004 paper,
except that Section 5 uses the 1997 Billingworth chest X-ray data.
8. … ?
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