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NIU Office of Public Affairs


News Release

Contact: Mark McGowan, NIU Office of Public Affairs
(815) 753-9472

February 17, 2005

NIU Faculty Development center working
on second Responsible Conduct in Research grant

DeKalb — That it happened at the Yale School of Medicine is not as important as that it happened at all.

According to the third edition of “Fraud and Misconduct in Biomedical Research,” an assistant professor of medicine and his superior, who was not associated with the research, published an article in the American Journal of Medicine in 1979.

Unfortunately, the book states, the junior colleague had plagiarized parts of the article from a New England Journal of Medicine manuscript that had been sent a year earlier for review. The subsequent investigation found that “most of the data in his own joint study had been faked … (and) of 14 articles, only two could be approved, and the data were either missing or fraudulent in the remaining 12.”

Ten of those dozen listed as co-author the senior researcher, who resigned from a “prestigious post at Columbia University, to which he had been appointed while the episode was unfolding.”

“This was a phenomenal case,” said Murali Krishnamurthi, director of Northern Illinois University’s Faculty Development and Instructional Design Center. “It really stirred up at the time the need for some controls.”

A quarter-century later, the concerns and questions remain.

Krishnamurthi and Dan Cabrera, multimedia coordinator for Faculty Development, are the recipients of a $25,000 federal grant to develop online training modules that illuminate issues regarding mentoring and collaboration in research.

The Office of Research Integrity, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and sponsor of the grants for Responsible Conduct in Research, awarded Krishnamurthi an equal amount in 2003 to develop an online training module on data management.

The results are available free of charge at http://www.niu.edu/rcrportal, and no password is needed.

Krishnamurthi and Cabrera will complete their new project in December and post it online for anyone interested in understanding the issues and guidelines of data accessibility, dissemination of research outcomes, the listing of authors and collaboration across institutions and even countries.

“It’s really important for researchers to know their responsibilities, and it’s helpful to know the issues up front. There are a lot of possibilities for scientific misconduct,” Krishnamurthi says.

“It could be an exploitation of the power differential between the senior and junior person in a mentoring relationship, taking advantage of the junior faculty researcher or a grad student mentored by the faculty, and not recognizing the student’s contribution to the research,” he adds. “Or perhaps when a grad student is writing a paper, he or she feels obligated to include the faculty adviser’s name on it, but the adviser might not have made a substantial contribution or even known about it.”

“This is aimed at a broad range of research personnel in diverse institutions,” Cabrera says. “It’s not recommended as a stand-alone course but as a supplement to existing courses.”

Users of the online module will, as in the earlier program, encounter case studies and hypothetical situations that present information, pose questions and request decisions. Each decision yields a consequence and, it is hoped, teaches and eventually prevents misconduct in research.

NIU faculty again are contributing their expertise – and their experiences – to develop the situations, games and quizzes.

“People really respond more to this than just a paper-and-pencil or word processing format. They’re faced with some sort of ethical dilemma in a safe environment. It’s self-paced. Users can go as quickly or as slowly as they want. There are flash games which really require the participation of the user,” Cabrera says. “We also have a discussion board designed for users who have navigated through a case study scenario and who may want to engage with other online users about alternative choices or outcomes not originally included in the case study.”

The first module, now a link on the ORI’s Web site, is enjoying national and even international exposure.

“Its success is the reason we got the second grant,” Krishnamurthi says. “It’s really rare to receive the second grant, and it’s nice recognition for NIU and our faculty.”

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