Conducting a scientific study requires ethical conduct, for this there is pre-registration, researchers must comply with certain ethical assumptions that ensure the validity of the research, however, in some cases bad practices are committed in scientific research, which consist of applying small tricks for the study to progress and finally be published.
The dynamics of research, in which the most important thing is to publish, can put negative pressure, hence the so-called bad practices arise. There have been some very striking cases in history, such as the Stanford prison experience and the Case of Diederik Stapel.
- The Stanford prison experience is one of the most famous in social psychology.
- However.
- Some recordings have recently been leaked demonstrating the bad practices that apply to it.
Examples of the use of anecdotal or informal evidence, the formation of custodians, implicit requests and interpretation of the results. After all, there was a debate about whether this study should be included in the books or not.
Diederik Stapel was professor of social psychology at the University of Tilburg. In 2011, Stapel was found to have falsified data from several of his studies. Stapel, instead of using participants in his studies, supplemented the data himself, inventing it so that the results were always what he expected.
These bad practices were alien to his students, who trusted his teacher, until one of his phD students is surprised that he always has participants for his studies and that he always finds the desired results, from there everything was discovered.
“Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. “Adam Smith?
While these cases have had a major impact and have surfaced over time, they are a minority. Most bad practices are more subtle. Among the most common are the following:
One solution to these bad practices is pre-registration. The pre-registration is to make public the objectives and methodology of the studies that will be carried out before they actually begin, so that anyone can verify that the studies were conducted ethically, just as the researchers said they would.
Pre-registration is very simple. There are specific pages on the Internet for this, one is Open Science Framework (OSF)
This page offers several worksheets in which it is possible to pre-register, as well as the possibility to download all the study material (databases, questionnaires, supplementary materials, etc. ) and make it public in a simple way.
“The important thing in science is not only to get new data, but to discover new ways of thinking about it. “William Lawrence Bragg-
The different worksheets available in OSF for pre-registration vary, some ask for more information than others. Taking as an example one of the simplest, called Aspredicted, the fields to be filled in are:
In this way, when made public, the information of the studies is visible to everyone, so the possibility of doing bad practices is limited.
While pre-registration takes longer, as it is necessary to think carefully about how the research will be conducted before its launch, its use is increasingly prevalent and allows science to be more transparent and conclusions more robust.