Research Integrity Fundamentals: What Every Author Must Know

Most researchers would never fabricate data or plagiarise another person's work. Yet research integrity violations — including subtler forms such as selective reporting, undisclosed conflicts of interest, and inappropriate authorship — are more common than outright fraud. Understanding the full spectrum of integrity issues is essential, not just for avoiding misconduct, but for contributing responsibly to the scientific record.

The Four Core Principles

Honesty: Report your methods and findings accurately and completely. Do not selectively present results that support your hypothesis while omitting those that complicate it. This includes negative results, null findings, and data that did not behave as expected.

Transparency: Make your methods, data, and analysis code accessible to other researchers so that your work can be verified and built upon. Pre-register your hypotheses when possible, and disclose any deviations from the pre-registered protocol.

Accountability: Take responsibility for your work and for the work of researchers you supervise. If an error is discovered after publication, issue a correction promptly. If a serious error is discovered, retraction is appropriate and required — not optional.

Fairness: Give appropriate credit to all contributors through authorship or acknowledgement. Do not add gift authors who did not contribute meaningfully, and do not omit contributors who did.

Authorship: More Complex Than It Looks

The ICMJE criteria for authorship require that all authors have made a substantial contribution to conception, design, data acquisition, or analysis; have drafted or critically revised the work; have approved the final version; and can be held accountable for the work. Simply running a piece of equipment or collecting data does not automatically qualify someone as an author. Equally, a senior colleague who had no involvement in a study does not belong on the author list regardless of their seniority.

Conflicts of Interest

A conflict of interest exists when your financial, professional, or personal interests could influence your research or its reporting. Disclose conflicts of interest to the journal at submission, whether or not you believe they have actually influenced your work. Journals will make their own determination. Undisclosed conflicts discovered after publication are taken very seriously.

Research integrity is not a bureaucratic requirement. It is the foundation upon which the credibility of science rests. Every paper you publish is a permanent contribution to the public record — accuracy and honesty in that record matter.