ELEC-L0902 - Introduction to Doctoral Studies D, Lectures, 20.1.2022-7.4.2022

Please read the material below. Your group should pick either option I or option II. Please write down your 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 comment each link and point in your findings.

Material

Read through the 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 the topic
  

• How do you feel about the rules and conventions regarding your topic
  

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

Option II

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

• 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 In the University of Eastern Finland a degree was revoked a few years ago.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 the 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 "General discussion" area in the Course Information section (at the end of the page). Write plain text to the discussion area, don't upload files. Be prepared to present the key points of your work to other groups.

Please don't forget to mention the names of all group members in your posting. One posting per group is enough.