Postdoctoral Fellow: Understanding scientists' views of good research practice

一般观众摘要一名博士后研究员将在PI的指导下进行分析，提取科学家用来解决有关科学诚信和良好科学实践的问题的关键概念。这位研究员将分析大约2500页对在学术和合作环境中工作的科学家的文字采访，了解他们对良好研究实践和价值观(如适用性、风险和责任)的概念。解决这些问题很重要，因为科学家越来越被迫交流和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将科学商业化。该项目的总体目标是通过向不同受众揭示表达、解释、批评和捍卫其方法标准及其价值的关键概念工具来促进这些交流做法。该项目的结果可作为更深入地分析在科学与更广泛的公众之间传播良好研究实践的初步研究。此外，他们将被纳入本科生和研究生课程，并将与其他科学教育工作者分享。技术总结博士后研究员将采取自下而上的方法，检查科学家认为对他们的研究至关重要的方法论、认识论和伦理价值观，他们对这些价值观有什么态度，以及当他们向他人解释他们对良好科学实践的看法时，他们遇到了什么挑战。这个项目既及时又重要。关于科学家自己如何概念化他们对良好研究实践和科学诚信的看法，以及他们在讨论这些问题时可能面临的概念性挑战，人们知之甚少。这位研究员将利用可获得的采访来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的合理性。通过分析他们对协作的看法、它们的优点和潜在的缺点，特别是通过评估科学家为协作工作确定的动机，将有可能完善不同形式的协作实践的最新分类。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，它将使我们更深入地了解科学家对实验复制和复制结果交流的重视程度，以及他们如何协调复制发现的必要性与产生和发表新颖和原创结果的压力之间的矛盾。

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.