Researchers urged on integrity, ethics

The newly appointed Vice-Chancellor of Chrisland University, Abeokuta, Prof Oyeduni Arulogun, has emphasised that Nigeria could only thrive and make appreciable progress when researchers prioritise integrity and conduct their research with every sense of responsibility.

Arulogun disclosed this on Thursday during the two days of institutional training on responsible conduct of research for the lecturers organised by the Centre for Bioethics and Research Nigeria in collaboration with the university.

The Vice-Chancellor said, “The essential thing about research is that it must be based on honesty, truthfulness, confidentiality, and respect for the rights of others.

“The take home is that we must do our research with every sense of responsibility, fairness and truthfulness, that is when we can have the desired change in our society

“So, this training is to strengthen the capability of lecturers to do research that is fair, just, credible and that can bring about the desired change in the society”.

Speaking earlier, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the university, Prof Ebenezer Farombi, said many researchers who refused to embrace responsible conduct in their research have been sacked, stripped of their professorial post, and humiliated out of office.

Farombi said, “Quite a number of researchers are not conducting their research properly, there is a lot of misconduct, especially in this part of the world where we tend to do things as we like, we’ll do research here and it will not be reproducible in other parts of the world.

“We have lots of issues here like fabrication, falsification of data and plagiarism. The issue of authorship is there too, not every time you see a name on a book that you will conclude he or she is the author, sometimes it is by arrangement of rub my back and I rub yours.

The Project Coordinator, Centre For Bioethics and Research Nigeria, Adesola Adeyemo, said the essence of the training was to scale up the capacity of the lecturers and armed them with sufficient knowledge on responsible conduct of research.

Adeyemo added that the researchers must carefully avoid three cardinal sins of fabrication, falsification of data as well as plagiarism, saying that indulgence in any of the infractions impinges on the integrity of the research and makes the outcome unreliable and misleading for the people.