Causes of questionable scientific research through medical specialties residents perception

Abstract

Introduction: Data fabrication, falsification and plagiarism are
considered serious forms of scientific misconduct.
Objective: To identify evidence of misconduct and the most common
favorable conditions perceived by residents of the medical specialties of
the University of Medical Sciences of Havana.
Material and Methods: Cross-sectional descriptive research in which
residents of the University of Medical Sciences of Havana were surveyed.
A questionnaire on the practice of scientific misconduct was applied in
two independent settings (regular class and evaluation). We worked with
the scientific misconduct variable and its types, and other variables of
a demographic type. A Bayesian association test was performed using
version 0.9 of the R Library called the Bayes factor with default standards
and a multinomial sampling plan with fixed column totals. Under the null
hypothesis it is assumed that columns have the same probabilities in the
multinomial distribution.
Results: Plagiarism was the most common type of malpractice
followed by fabrication of data and falsification of results. The Bayesian
association test carried out results in a probability of 0.309 (FB < 1) in
favor of the null hypothesis, which suggests independence between the
group variables and scientific misconduct.
Conclusions: There is evidence that, in addition to plagiarism, other
forms of scientific misconduct such as the fabrication and falsification of
results may be present in our environment. However, this type of practice
is considered unjustified by the majority of the interviewees. Pressure
plays an important role as a cause of scientific misconduct and increases
the risk when other factors such as dishonesty, ignorance and disinterest
are present