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Principal Investigator

Objective

• Developing guidelines that summarize the issues that need to be considered in creating a sound research environment that fully motivates researchers.
• Developing variations of the guidelines for different settings, such as research program design, research grant review, institutional performance review, and laboratory practices.
• Developing workshop programs to share the point of view of the guidelines.
• Sharing the point of view of the guidlines through the top-down policy in collaboration with the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), in the planning of research programs and research evaluation.
• Spreading the point of view of the gudilines in the research community as a bottom-up movement through active workshops, collaboration with academic societies, and social networking services.
• To contribute academically to the field of research integrity through publication of the studies with the questionnaires.
• Establishment of a government-academia network where the members understand the motivation of researchers and the chracteristics of high quality research.

Outline

We have found a wave of research misconduct cases with a huge impact on our society in the field of life sciences. Recent surveys suggest that 10-20% of the papers should contain a certain kind of misconduct or malpractice and promotion of research integrity might be an urgent issue. We pay a particular attention to the primordial motivation of researchers, such as expansion of our intellectual frontier and development of novel approach to therapy, and propose a hypothesis here that the research environment, which encourages respect for researchers’ motivation, should prevent research misconduct and enhance high-quality research. We will conduct semi-structured interviews with several experienced researchers to extract and verbalize the factors influencing the motivation of the researchers and the characteristics of treacherous research practice. Based on the findings obtained by these interviews, we will design and perform the questionnaire survey to a large population of life science researchers to clarify the diversity of understanding. These results will be published as an academic paper and some guidelines for establishment and maintenance of sound research environment will be proposed. We, furthermore, will expand common understanding of the guidelines through the campaign with the government and academic societies or the glass-roots activities in the field of life science, providing an opportunity to reconsider the research climate. The human network that shares the understanding of researchers' philosophy and research integrity will develop between government and academia through this project.