Postdoctoral Fellow: Understanding scientists' views of good research practice

一名博士后研究员将在PI的指导下开展一项分析工作，该分析将提取科学家用来解决有关科学诚信和良好科学实践问题的关键概念。这名研究员将分析大约2500页的采访记录，采访对象是在学术和合作环境中工作的科学家，内容涉及他们对良好研究实践的概念，以及适用性、风险和责任等价值观。解决这些问题是很重要的，因为科学家越来越被迫交流并公开捍卫他们的标准和价值观，无论他们是在更传统的学术环境中工作，还是更坚定地致力于商业化的科学。这个项目的总体目标是通过揭示关键的概念工具来促进这些交流实践，这些工具可以向不同的受众表达、解释、批评和捍卫它们的方法标准和价值。该项目的结果可以作为一项初步研究，为更深入地分析如何在科学与更广泛的公众之间的界面上传播良好的研究实践提供依据。此外，它们将被整合到本科和研究生课程中，并将与其他科学教育者共享。该博士后将采用自下而上的方法来研究科学家认为对其研究至关重要的方法论、认识论和伦理价值观，他们对这些价值观的态度，以及他们在向他人解释他们对良好科学实践的看法时遇到的挑战。这个项目既及时又重要。科学家自己是如何将他们对良好研究实践和科学诚信的看法概念化的，以及他们在讨论这些问题时可能面临的概念性挑战，人们所知甚少。该研究员将利用现有的访谈，提供大量的实证例子，说明科学家如何在日常研究中利用和证明价值陈述。通过分析他们对合作的看法，他们的优点和潜在的缺点，特别是通过评估科学家对合作工作的动机，将有可能改进不同形式的合作实践的最新分类。此外，该项目将提供更多关于在不同科学领域中什么是复制的信息。最重要的是，它将更深入地了解科学家对实验复制和复制结果交流的重要性，以及他们如何在复制发现的感知必要性和产生和发表新颖和原创结果的感知压力之间进行协商。

General Audience Summary A post-doctoral research fellow will work under the guidance of the PI to carry out an analysis that will extract key concepts that scientists use to address questions regarding scientific integrity and good scientific practice. The fellow will analyze approximately 2,500 pages of transcribed interviews with scientists who work in academic and collaborative environments about their conceptions of good research practice and values such as applicability, risk, and responsibility. It is important to address these issues since scientists are increasingly compelled to communicate and publicly defend their standards and values regardless of whether they work in a more traditional academic environment or whether they are more strongly committed to commercialized science. The overall goal of this project is to facilitate these communication practices by bringing to light key conceptual tools to express, explain, critique, and defend their methodological standards and their values to different audiences. The results of this project may serve as a preliminary study for more in-depth analyses of communicating good research practice at the interface between science and broader publics. In addition, they will be integrated into undergraduate and graduate course, and they will be shared with other science educators.Technical Summary The post-doctoral fellow will take a bottom-up approach to examine the methodological, epistemic, and ethical values that scientists consider crucial for their research, what attitudes they have toward these values, and what challenges they encounter when they explain their views of good scientific practice to others. The project is both timely and important. Very little is known about how scientists themselves conceptualize their views of good research practice and scientific integrity and about the conceptual challenges they may face in discussions about those issues. The fellow will draw on available interviews to provide numerous empirical examples of how scientists utilize and justify value statements in everyday research. By analyzing their views about collaborations, their merits and potential downsides, and particularly by assessing what motivations scientists identify for collaborative work, it will be possible to refine recent taxonomies of different forms of collaborative practices. In addition, the project will yield more information about what counts as replication in different scientific fields. Most importantly, it will provide deeper insight into the significance that scientists attach to the replication of experiments and to the communication of the outcomes of replications and about how they negotiate tensions between the perceived necessity to replicate findings and the perceived pressure to produce and publish novel and original results.