Research integrity guidelines neglect injustices and DEI

Research integrity (RI) guidelines around the world increasingly recognise fairness, diversity, equity and inclusion.

But a new analysis suggests that fairness is still understood predominantly in procedural terms – for example, through fair authorship, peer review and misconduct procedures – while the structural inequalities that shape who conducts research, whose knowledge is recognised and who sets the rules are usually neglected.

This neglect risks reproducing colonial hierarchies and reinforcing the marginalisation of Indigenous and Global South actors and epistemic and ethical frameworks, the study argues.

Therefore, there is a need for the integration of non-Eurocentric, Indigenous knowledge and ethical frameworks in RI guiding documents for researchers.

These were the conclusions of the study, “Fairness in Research Integrity Guidelines Across the World: A Critical Discourse Analysis", which was published in the Journal of Academic Ethics on 2 September.

The conclusions were drawn after analysing 66 national and international guidelines and codes of conduct for RI originated from 39 countries in Europe, Africa, South America, North America, Asia and Oceania.

“The topic of ‘research fairness’ is receiving growing attention in Research Integrity (RI) initiatives, with increasing acknowledgement of the relationship between RI and fairness concerns such as diversity equity and inclusion (DEI) and responsible collaborations,” the study says.

“However, initiatives usually neglect addressing structural injustices and their relationship to RI. Furthermore, RI standards are mostly set in economically powerful countries but are applied globally, posing a risk of ethical imperialism and reinforcing existing colonial hierarchies.”

The study analysed three aspects of ‘fairness’: Addressing injustices, attention to colonial hierarchies and DEI.

The authors – Clàudia Pallisé Perelló, María de los Ángeles Crespo López, Natalie Evans, Johannes Ket, Mariëtte van den Hoven and Krishma Labib at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands – say their study provides the “first systematic scoping review” of RI documents critically assessing the treatment of fairness.

“Moreover, it is also the first one that takes an explicit anticolonial and systemic justice perspective, putting structural inequalities in the centre of the analysis.”

Maura Hiney, an adjunct professor of Research Integrity at University College Dublin’s Institute for Discovery in Ireland, told University World News that the study is “very timely and will be an important consideration for the revision of the All European Academies (ALLEA) European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity and the ongoing development of an African Code of Conduct for Research Integrity and AI”.

“While the necessarily high level of such frameworks precludes detailed elaboration of the concepts explored in the paper, they can nonetheless seek to clarify their importance for research integrity in more meaningful ways,” added Hiney, who served as chair and co-authored the ALLEA European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (2017 and 2023).

Zeenath Reza Khan, founding president for the Centre for Academic Integrity at the University of Wollongong in Dubai, United Arab Emirates and Audit Group member for the European Network for Academic Integrity, told University World News that it was a “valuable and timely study” that offered an important opportunity for the research integrity community to “reflect on whether our existing frameworks adequately represent the diverse environments in which research is conducted”.

However, the research findings also raise questions about how research systems maintain common expectations for reliability, transparency and accountability while allowing legitimate contextual, Indigenous and epistemic diversity.

Lokman Meho, Professor and University Librarian at American University of Beirut in Lebanon and the developer of the Research Integrity Risk Index (RI²), told University World News that greater fairness in funding, collaboration, authorship, and participation should help create better research but not become a separate goal that competes with research quality and integrity.

Scant mention of injstices

The study found that RI documents originated mostly from European countries, with limited representation from elsewhere – of the 39 national documents, 24 came from European countries, with the rest originating from Africa (2), South America (1), North America (1), Asia (9) and Oceania (2).

The majority of the included documents referred to fairness only as “procedural”, covering issues such as fair authorship, peer review, and misconduct investigations.

A large number of guidance documents addressed diversity equity and inclusion (DEI) principles with at least one of these words being mentioned in just under half of the documents, but their uses vary significantly in terms of depth and meaning, the study found.

More than half of the documents either do not mention DEI or approach these in a more symbolic or superficial way, reflecting a more tokenistic or performative vision, the study said.

In these cases, the word “diversity” often appears without further elaboration, concrete actions, or clear links to research practices.

In general, the study found few documents explicitly mentioned issues of injustice, such as knowledge and material extractivism, epistemic injustice, and socioeconomic inequities.

It noted that Global North documents often fail to acknowledge in a meaningful way three forms of systemic injustice – injustices related to colonial history, socioeconomic injustices and injustices affecting the environment.

None of the documents explicitly mention ‘colonialism’. A small number discuss inequities in knowledge production in different countries, although they do not refer to these as colonial legacies or realities.

Only a minority of the documents acknowledge the validity of diverse epistemic values and systems, with most instead promoting Global North knowledge systems.

In general, many of the documents frame ‘objectivity’ as the approach of scientific research, but the study authors argue that this implicitly excludes diverse epistemic values.

The few codes of conduct that explicitly confronted colonial hierarchies came from colonised nations.

The study found some documents acknowledged diverse knowledge systems and ethical frameworks, but even these documents often reflected assumptions of colonial hierarchies in their language. For instance, they portrayed Indigenous and marginalised groups as “passive” agents and receivers of research rather than as “active” groups capable of conducting research.

Overall, the study unveiled that most European RI frameworks tended to frame fairness without taking into account structural injustices, colonial hierarchies and DEI systematically, reinforcing watered-down, “procedural” rather than “structural” visions of fairness.

“While most dominant RI initiatives can be considered Eurocentric, they have global influence, for instance via funding frameworks, publishing ethics, and data management requirements.

“Therefore, they might be considered a form of ‘ethical imperialism’, in which Eurocentric understandings of RI and responsible conduct of research are imposed across the world,” the study argues.

Speaking to University World News, lead author Perelló said the study found that the predominant standards that define “ethical” and “good” research, or define which issues are considered Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) or RI concerns, are mostly coming from Western contexts that “frequently fail to consider or include local frameworks, epistemic traditions, or histories of injustice and their associated concerns”.

She added that “deeper questions of structural injustice and equity in science are rarely addressed”.

Key messages for policy makers

Perelló said RI guidelines should acknowledge both the structural conditions in which research is conducted and ethical and epistemic plurality.

“This involves, on the one hand, recognising that universal and culturally neutral ethical frameworks do not exist, and, on the other hand, legitimising the existence of diverse epistemic traditions.”

She said there are good existing examples, such as the “Te Ara Tika Guidelines for Mori research ethics: A framework for researchers and ethics committee members or the San Code on Research Ethics”, which show that it is possible to “explicitly integrate non-Eurocentric, Indigenous knowledge and ethical frameworks in RI guiding documents for researchers in a situated way”.

Impact of funding inequality

Khan said the study “reminds us that fairness in research integrity cannot be understood only through procedures such as authorship, peer review or misconduct processes.

“As research becomes increasingly global and collaborative, our integrity frameworks also need to remain attentive to context, inclusion and different knowledge traditions,” she said.

Meho said the study shows that research integrity is not only about whether individual researchers follow rules and procedures.

“It is also shaped by the conditions in which researchers work, such as unequal access to funding and research resources, unequal power in international collaborations, and differences in who sets research standards and whose knowledge is recognised,” he said.

Call to widen perspectives

He argues that standards intended to apply internationally should not be developed mainly from the perspective of a small number of countries.

“Researchers from different countries and research systems, especially those currently under-represented, should have a meaningful role in deciding what constitutes responsible research,” Meho suggested.

Independent Research Ethics and Integrity Consultant, Dr Lyn Horn, former director of the Office of Research Integrity at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, told University World News she is grateful that scholars are taking this conversation forward.

“One of the biggest challenges for researchers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), especially in Africa, is that a huge amount of research funding comes from the Global North, and they dictate leadership requirements and project management aspects, not without reason, as they need to ensure that the high-income country (HIC) taxpayer money produces the intended outcomes,” said Horn, who is the lead author for “The Cape Town Statement on fairness, equity and diversity in research” made in 2023.

“One structural change that I believe would shift the balance would be for LMIC governments to provide a lot more funding for good-quality research directly and for HIC funders to provide a percentage of co-funding but enable projects to be LMIC-led and managed, providing support rather than dictating all administrative aspects, which is currently usually the case,” she added.

“This would advance LMIC research management systems, including ethics and integrity monitoring, at both institutional and national levels,” Horn said.