The juicy scandals, the rising star scientists turned villains – is that the story about research integrity? I’m not sure how that question crept into my mind, but one day the voice was so loud that I really had to listen to it. It had something to say about how I was teaching research integrity. When I started, there were no INTEGRITY projects or experienced collaborators to discuss with, so like many others; I had to work out for myself how to do this. This wasn’t straightforward, and I thought that sharing some of my thoughts and experiences would actually be a good way to start this series of blog posts that we intend to keep going through the duration of the INTEGRITY project.

It seems to go without saying that doctoral students should be taught research integrity, and we of course expect supervisors to be modelling good research practice. But in my own institution, we didn’t have any formal teaching in research integrity until about twelve years ago, and my involvement was almost accidentally. I had started to teach animal research ethics, which is part of my own research portfolio, and I had found a colleague to teach the corresponding ethics of research with human subjects. That combination seemed to be asking for an overarching introductory lecture on ethics, and I started to search for material and ideas for that. Conflict of interests and publication ethics rapidly emerged as relevant topics.

As did, of course, scientific misconduct. The big juicy topic of scientific misconduct, with its fascinating cases of promising scientists turned despicable villains. At the time I started to prepare my lecture, one of them was a British medical doctor purporting a link between MMR vaccination and autism on what was revealing to be very questionable grounds. And then there was a Norwegian dentist who did cancer research and had been found to invent his research subjects. So I began my lecture with one of them and ended with the other, and in between I popped some conflict of interests and publication ethics.

And that’s how I taught for the first few years, before I started to ask what kind of message this really was conveying. I think it was a question that had grown out of reflections I was already making in teaching animal ethics to animal welfare students. When choosing a topic to write on, students would always gravitate towards the most provocative issues, and however understandable I think that is, I also think it detracts attention from the much more frequent and in practice much more important issues. But wait, wasn’t that what I was doing in my research integrity teaching? Shouldn’t I be teaching integrity closer to home, and above all closer to where the students were?

Clearly, I wasn’t the first person to make that reflection, because I didn’t have to search long before I found a teaching tool that showed research integrity from the perspective of a doctoral student. The Integrity Factor is a video in which we get to follow Tess, a first-year PhD student, during a few days of her professional life. At each critical decision, we get to decide with Tess, and the way the story will unfold depends on which choice we get Tess to make. These are mundane situations: the manual for the analysis kit is missing, you have agreed to have a coffee with your best friend but you also need to run one more experiment before a critical report is due, you need advice but your supervisor is on the road and has no time. Mundane, but also critical, as anyone who spends half an hour with Tess will realise. And we all recognize these situations, we have all been there. So much so that the last time I used the video in teaching, I was in fact feeling mildly queasy, reminded as I was of all similar situations I had been in.

I use this video as an interactive tool in the classroom. So at each turning point, I stop the video. In groups of 3-4, the students discuss which choice to make and finally each group writes down their choice and the majority gets to choose in which direction to move the story forward.

Does it work? Ultimately, the answer to that question is in whether it prepares the students to make the right decisions when they face integrity challenges. I wish I had the answer to that question. I doubt that I ever will. But I know that it works for me as a teacher, in that it feels like the right way of transmitting what I think are the crucial issues. It also seems to work for the students in engaging them in discussions and interactions.