ELEC-L0902 - Introduction to Doctoral Studies D, Lecture, 24.8.2021-15.10.2021

Please read the material. Your group should pick one of the options I or II. Please write down some findings, you can use lists and bullet points. You can also express your own feelings and ideas. Please include links to everything interesting you found, and please comment each link and point your findings. Write your findings and links in the course discussion area in the Course Information section, so that others will easily see your work, together with a list of group members. Write plain text to the discussion area, don't upload files. Be prepared to present key points of your work.

Material

Read through Responsible conduct of research and procedures for handling allegations of misconduct in Finland, published by The Finnish Advisory Board on Research Integrity (TENK). The English version is near the end of the booklet. Please also check Aalto's Research ethics for doctoral students page and possibly also other Aalto guidelines and sources outside Aalto.

Option I

• Is it easy to understand and cope with
  

• How do you feel about the rules and conventions

• How do you plan and conduct your research so that you follow good practice in this area
  

Topics:

1. Plagiarism: forms and avoiding it
   

2. Fabrication and falsification

3. Authorship, who to include in your paper

4. Rights of research subjects, ethical committee approvals
   

5. Agreements between parties before research
   

Option II

Find a case, where misconduct has been suspected. Answer at least some of these questions according to sources you find:

• What type of misconduct was suspected?
• How did the case seem to differ from good conduct?
• How were suspicions handled by the scientific institution?
• Did the way of handling follow the recommendations of TENK, or how did it differ?
• What kind of consequences, if any, followed?

Write down your observations for each question in a few sentences. Note that our purpose is not to judge the case, you can't know all aspects by just reading about it. Include links to the articles you used or if you examined some original materials.

There are known allegations of misconduct for example in VTT, Finland, by professor Matej Oresic and in Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, by professor Paolo Macchiarini. In the University of Eastern Finland a degree was revoked a few years ago. Some wrongdoing was claimed to be in a Master's thesis of Finnish presidential candidate Laura Huhtasaari and in both Master's and doctoral thesis of an Austrian minister
Christine Aschbacher. You are welcome to use any other case, too. We want to point that these have been allegations and the course staff doesn't claim any of these examples actually being or not being misconduct.

Submission to the General discussion area

Please submit your writings to the discussion area in the Course Information section.

Please note that there is also the News forum besides the General discussion area in that section, please pick the General discussion area since writing to the News forum is for course staff only.

Mention names of your group members in your posting. One posting is enough for the group.