Effective Practices
Support a culture of ethical behavior in your department
- Read the APS Guidelines on Ethics and examine the extent to which your institutional and/or departmental policies support adherence to these guidelines.
- Hold departmental discussions about ethics and how your current policies and practices encourage or discourage ethical behavior.
- See 4 below for guidance on creating formal departmental ethics guidelines.
- If needed, revise departmental policies and practices to encourage ethical behavior and discourage unethical behavior from all department members.
- Review guidelines for tenure, promotion, and other evaluation processes and ensure that they reward ethical behavior and do not create a pressure to publish above all else. Recognize that such pressure can encourage unethical behavior in the conduct and publication of research and/or in the treatment of subordinates.
- Review guidelines for hiring procedures and ensure that they encourage and support ethical and equitable hiring practices. See the section on How to Be an Effective Chair for guidance on how to hire strong and diverse faculty and staff.
- Investigate the impacts of current policies and practices on department members in vulnerable roles (e.g., undergraduate researchers, graduate students, postdocs, and non-tenure-track instructional and research staff) through a review of your climate, as described in the section on Departmental Culture and Climate. Establish transparent and equitable guidelines delineating the rights of people in each of these roles and the processes through which they can be hired, reassigned, or terminated.
- Investigate the impact of present policies and practices on department members from . See the section on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for guidance on how to analyze the current state of affairs for marginalized groups in your department and pay separate attention to the particular needs and concerns of different groups and individuals.
- See the section on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for guidance on how to use departmental and institutional policies and procedures to address bias, microaggressions, and harassment.
- Set and reinforce the expectation of a safe and harassment-free environment in all departmental settings and activities, e.g., research labs, classes, seminars, colloquia, and social events. Create structures to ensure that department members feel safe reporting harassment and other ethics violations. See the section on Departmental Culture and Climate for guidance on how to educate everyone involved in your department about the importance of a healthy culture and climate and the roles needed to support it.
- Ensure that all departmental members know about institutional resources for reporting and discussing ethics concerns, e.g., ombudspersons, your ethics office, or your research integrity office.
- Provide non-judgmental and confidential ways for students, faculty, staff, and postdocs to raise questions and concerns about ethics, e.g., discussions with a campus ombudsperson, a departmental ethics advisor or committee, and/or a webform for reporting concerns.
- Model and establish expectations for discussions and meetings that enable all people to be heard and their ideas to be properly credited.
- Be mindful of power imbalances and other circumstances that may limit the extent to which some people feel free to voice opinions or raise concerns. See the section on Departmental Culture and Climate for guidance on how to recognize and account for power imbalances among department members.
- Establish a plan for how your department will support department members in engaging in ethical behavior. Revisit this plan regularly, emphasizing the importance of continued improvement and staying up to date on the latest recommendations on ethics.
- Invite people with expertise in ethics to give presentations and/or lead discussions or workshops. For example, bring in an external ethics expert for a colloquium, ask a faculty member who has served as a journal editor to speak to an advanced lab class about ethical issues in publishing, and/or invite your institution’s research integrity officer or equivalent to attend occasional faculty meetings to address research integrity and mentoring of students on ethical issues.
- Discuss ethics in physics in various forums, e.g., departmental meetings, colloquia, research group meetings, meetings of student groups, and courses. Include introductions to basic ethical practices and the impact of unethical behavior, role playing of responses to case studies of ethical dilemmas in physics, and discussions of readings on ethics topics. Post suggested readings and resources on a departmental website. See Resources below.
- Regularly communicate to faculty the importance and implications of institutionally mandated training related to ethics (e.g., research ethics, conflict-of-interest, Title IX, anti-bias, and anti-harassment training) and encourage them to use it as a resource. Also consider advocating to ensure that institutional ethics training is appropriate to the issues that physics faculty are likely to face, comprehensive, and thoughtful.
- If needed, supplement your institution’s training with additional topics relevant to physics and your department. For example, include training for faculty on supervising research students and communicating effectively and inclusively with mentees, and/or training for graduate students and postdocs on ethical treatment of data. See the Undergraduate Research section Resources for a list of training programs for research mentoring in physics.
- See the section on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for guidance on how to make training in equity, diversity, and inclusion a part of professional development in your department.
- Have discussions in departmental faculty meetings on ethical issues surrounding research. Include topics such as the impacts of increasing pressures to publish and the conditions under which it is appropriate to use the same data in multiple publications, use multiple grants to support the same project, and/or cite one’s own work.
- Consider charging a departmental committee or individual with keeping up to date on and informing colleagues about diverse literature on ethical practices, recognizing that ethical guidelines change over time and vary across subdisciplines and cultures.
- Understand and publicize your institution’s policies and processes for reporting, investigating, and addressing ethics violations. Ensure that everyone in your department follows your institution’s procedures and knows whom to contact to report potential violations, e.g., your ethics coordinator, research integrity officer, department chair, or ombudsperson.
- For ethical issues that are not handled at an institutional level, create an accountability structure within your department with a process for reporting and acting swiftly on those issues, while maintaining and emphasizing the importance of due process. Work with your administration, ethics office, or research integrity office, as appropriate. Ensure that complaints are taken seriously and responded to in a timely manner, and that complainants and those with less power do not have to drive the process. Maintain a written record of reported concerns.
- Develop straightforward mechanisms for people to report potential ethics violations, including anonymously (recognizing the limitations of anonymous reports). Ensure that all reports receive timely and appropriate responses.
- Ensure that there is a system in place to identify and document patterns of repeated complaints about the same person (e.g., a written record of complaints that can be checked when new complaints arise), and do not allow the behavior causing the complaints to continue unchecked. Ensure that this policy is applied consistently, regardless of the level or status of the person against whom complaints are made. Familiarize yourself with institutional policies and procedures for documenting and addressing complaints and other incidents that may not individually rise to the level of requiring disciplinary or legal action, but that may collectively establish an actionable pattern of behavior.
- Ensure that any departmental procedures for ethics complaints maintain confidentiality, establish consequences for retaliation, and are consistent with your institution’s rules for handling complaints about ethics and other related issues.
Support a culture of ethical teaching and learning and include ethics in your curriculum
- Create that focus on ethical practices pertaining to, e.g., research conduct and human interactions. Ensure that these outcomes are consistent with any institution-level program learning outcomes related to ethics.
- Consider formulating a departmental statement on ethics in courses and asking every member to include the statement in the syllabus of each course they teach. This statement should include standards for appropriate behavior (e.g., how to treat others and distinguish collaboration from cheating), consequences of unethical actions, and guidelines for how all members of a course (including instructional staff and ) can communicate about ethical issues.
- Make room in courses for discussions that may include, but are not limited to, the following ethical issues: ethical representation and interpretation of data, appropriate citation and attribution of work, determination of authorship, safety, explicit and , harassment, conflicts of interest, fabrication of data, plagiarism, and pressures that can lead people to make unethical choices, e.g., unreasonable metrics for research productivity.
- Provide students with the opportunity to explore the ethical issues raised by the uses of physics research in society, e.g., environmental destruction caused by the use of rare earth elements in battery development, the use of radioactive isotopes for medical treatments, the development and deployment of nuclear weapons, and the use of fluid dynamics for climate modeling.
- Use case studies with relevant examples from physics, such as the APS ethics case studies. See Resources below.
- Weave ethics discussions and topics into an existing departmental seminar series and/or meetings of student groups, and arrange discussion opportunities following these events.
- Offer a course or seminar on ethical issues in physics that provides an opportunity to discuss ethical principles, or leverage a course on ethics that is already being offered by another department. See Resources below.
- Teach students the value of keeping an accurate and comprehensive record (e.g., by using a laboratory notebook) of experimental activities that includes sufficient details about experimental setups, measurements, conditions, data, and outcomes to allow someone to reproduce the experiment.
- Explore with students how to ethically acquire, organize, annotate, and report data.
- Lead discussions that frame lab safety as an ethical obligation in science. See the section on Instructional Laboratories and Experimental Skills for guidance on how to create and maintain laboratory spaces and equipment and a safe environment.
- Recognize that some kinds of classroom or laboratory activities may create an incentive for students to behave unethically by making misrepresentation or fabrication of data the most effective way to achieve a goal. Modify such activities to support ethical practices. For example, ask students to measure quantities whose expected values they cannot predict independently, and avoid laboratory grading rubrics that overemphasize agreement between students’ data and expected results.
- Recognize that some grading and exam policies are likely to make cheating appealing, e.g., having high-stakes exams that test memorization or knowledge of specific problems and/or that are graded relative to other students’ performance. Adopt practices that make it less necessary to monitor for cheating, e.g., open-book exams, grading of explanations and not just answers, group projects for which collaboration is seen as a positive way to learn physics rather than a form of cheating, and an expectation that students list collaborators for all work.
- Make a code of student conduct or honor code part of your departmental culture. Post the code in classrooms and other spaces. Discuss it regularly and ask students to commit to it before each exam, as an alternative to monitoring students for cheating.
- Set a good example for students by, e.g., acknowledging sources of photographs, diagrams, graphs, and text used in course materials or presentations; acknowledging bounds of models and nuances of data interpretation; and discussing examples of how journal articles acknowledge contributors and cite other work.
- Lay out clear expectations of and have discussions about what kinds of collaboration, sources, and other assistance are allowed and/or encouraged in courses, e.g., on homework, papers, reports, and exams.
- Explicitly educate students about what is meant by plagiarism and related unethical conduct. Raise awareness among that students may not enter college with a common understanding of what behaviors constitute unethical practices in academic settings, and that such understandings may differ among cultures.
- Ensure that students understand your institution’s policy on plagiarism and unauthorized assistance on work (e.g., a code of student conduct or honor code), as well as policies on plagiarism, citation, and authorship standards commonly accepted in the physics community.
- Encourage students working in teams to have pre-work discussions on equitable division of labor and the importance of teamwork, and to rotate leadership opportunities within the team.
- Encourage student teams to develop statements describing how they have built ethical practices and principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion into their projects.
- Promote awareness among of the ethical obligation to use teaching practices that research has demonstrated to be effective for learning. See the section on Implementing Research-Based Teaching in Your Classroom for details.
- Promote awareness among of the ethical obligation to use equitable and inclusive teaching practices. See the section on Implementing Research-Based Teaching in Your Classroom for guidance on how to understand and implement inclusive teaching practices that support the diversity of students in your classes. See the section on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for guidance on how to ensure that your classes and curriculum are equitable and inclusive. See the section on Departmental Culture and Climate for guidance on how to ensure that your classes and curriculum create an inclusive and student-centered environment for all.
Support a culture of ethical research in your department
- Devote occasional department faculty meetings to research ethics, and encourage research groups to discuss research ethics at group meetings. Consider facilitating discussions of ethical issues such as pressures to meet deadlines and/or the importance of appropriate data backup processes. Use examples or case studies, such as the APS ethics case studies. See Resources below.
- Ensure that all researchers (including, e.g., students, postdocs, and research faculty) are familiar with campus procedures for addressing allegations of research misconduct and mistreatment of individuals, and know how to locate the campus office that handles these allegations.
- Require research supervisors to develop written agreements with undergraduate researchers, graduate students, and postdocs outlining topics such as expectations for work hours and time off, how grievances will be handled, and how research progress is assessed. Find templates, guidance, and examples for these tools from other departments or offices on campus and/or the Mentoring Tools section of The Science of Effective Mentorship in STEMM online guide.
- Provide resources for students and postdocs to further their understanding of research ethics. See Resources below.
- Encourage department members, particularly research supervisors, to have ad hoc discussions of ethics when opportunities or issues arise.
- If you have a graduate program, consider providing a required orientation for incoming graduate students to learn about research misconduct, departmental and institutional policies for addressing such misconduct, and gray areas related to research misconduct. See Resources below.
- Discuss standards for research integrity, encompassing, e.g., keeping of a research record; analysis, selection, and archiving of data; determination of appropriate authorship on papers and presentations; acknowledgement of intellectual contributions; comprehensive citation of previous work; respectfulness of interpersonal interactions; and incorporation of equity and inclusion principles.
- Support students and postdocs in learning about the proper use of research funding. For example, be transparent about how you ensure that research work is aligned with the grant supporting it and that the same work is not funded by two separate grants.
- Review student and postdoc work regularly to ensure that it is being performed ethically and documented appropriately and consistently.
- Ensure that all data are readily accessible to all group members, to the extent possible and appropriate. Avoid situations in which one person is managing all the data for a group or project.
- Ensure that all researchers (including students, postdocs, and research faculty) are informed of funding stipulations around research practices and misconduct. If research in your department includes research on human subjects (e.g., education research), see 3.E below.
- Require all research students and postdocs to attend research integrity trainings such as those discussed in 1.C.iii–v.
- Ensure that students and postdocs understand that research misconduct can have severe consequences for their lives and livelihood.
- If you have concerns about the ethics of a student’s or postdoc’s behavior, discuss your concerns directly in a one-on-one meeting. Try to understand their perspective and reserve judgment until you have heard from them.
- See additional advice in the section on Undergraduate Research on how to design meaningful research experiences for undergraduate students.
- Work to ensure that data manipulation (e.g., noise filters and cuts, application of Bayesian priors, and choice of model fits) is done ethically and appropriately, and train students in practices to avoid consciously or unconsciously pushing the analysis towards a desired result. Such practices include masking data in various ways and having different parts of the group conduct independent analyses.
- Discuss examples of data falsification, e.g., the inappropriate combination or use of data from other experiments, deliberate elimination of outliers, application of filters intended to hide alternative interpretations, or unethical manipulation of figures.
- Discuss examples of data fabrication, e.g., the addition of one or more points to a data set to improve the appearance of the data or the representation of data that were obtained under one set of conditions to be the outcome of a different set of conditions.
- Discuss plagiarism and the conditions under which self-plagiarism is acceptable.
- Discuss how to alleviate and counteract pressures that contribute to unethical behavior, e.g., the pressure to publish in prestigious journals or to confirm previous successes in order to achieve recognition, tenure, or a positive personnel evaluation.
- Promote a sense of shared responsibility for ensuring everyone’s safety, and discuss ways in which everyone can help eliminate sources of danger, such as exposed electrical wiring, improperly handled or labeled chemicals, and tripping hazards.
- Ensure that safety training addresses how to assist vulnerable people (e.g., those who use wheelchairs and/or have vision, hearing, and/or speech impairments) in case of emergencies.
- Conduct an annual safety audit of all research and instructional laboratory spaces with appropriate , researchers, and your safety officer. Consider also inviting a local industrial safety officer to assist and provide an outside perspective.
- Ensure that research supervisors develop a safety plan for each research project that includes planning for hazards. Hold a discussion following each project to review any safety concerns that arose.
- Ensure that and research supervisors regularly discuss with students and research group members how everyone can promote a positive safety culture in the lab by learning how to recognize and respond to unsafe situations and practices, fires, flooding, and natural disasters.
- Establish and publish processes for anyone to report potentially unsafe situations or practices to your department chair, safety officer, or other appropriate person.
- Ensure that all research supervisors recognize that they are responsible for the safety of researchers (including students, postdocs, and visitors) working in their research spaces.
- Encourage people who have recently participated in safety training to relate their experiences to their research group, so that group members can stay current on safety recommendations.
- Consider supplementing institutionally mandated safety training with training on practices relevant to specific research environments.
- See the section on Instructional Laboratories and Experimental Skills for guidance on how to create a positive safety culture and identify and address potential safety concerns.
- Ensure that any research in your department that involves human subjects (e.g., physics education research), is guided by and approved by an before the research begins, and that anyone who does such research receives IRB-mandated training. If your institution does not have an IRB, you must find collaborators whose IRB will review and approve the research.
- Ensure that any data on students that your department collects (e.g., pre and post assessment data) is handled according to regulations for personally identifiable records. However, recognize that FERPA does not prevent collecting and sharing of student data to improve your department: FERPA allows sharing of identifiable student data within your institution, including among , without the consent of students, when it is done to serve “legitimate educational interests” (FERPA section 99.31) and does not restrict the sharing and use of deidentified data.
- Encourage everyone who gathers information on people in your department to handle this information using ethical principles that meet and go beyond and requirements. For example, consider the privacy implications of posting course grade distributions in which there is a single outlier, and/or consider the harm to students of an educational study that includes a comparison group taught with educational practices that have been demonstrated to be less effective than those used for the experimental group.
Consider creating formal departmental ethics guidelines
- Learn about your institution’s ethics guidelines and any existing departmental ethics guidelines. Consider whether your department needs to develop guidelines beyond these and/or revise any existing guidelines.
- Ensure that your department’s guidelines are aligned with your institution’s guidelines.
- Hold discussions in faculty meetings on the benefits of establishing clear ethics guidelines and procedures, and the downsides of not having such guidelines and procedures in place. Consider inviting an outside facilitator, such as someone from your ethics office or research integrity office.
- Ensure that everyone has a voice in discussions of ethics guidelines. For example, hold department-wide town halls and/or solicit ideas through surveys. In smaller departments, devote a portion of your departmental meeting to the topic and invite students to attend.
- Consider forming a working group or holding a department retreat (including faculty, postdocs, students, and staff) to draft departmental ethics guidelines. Guidelines can be based on a larger institutional set of guidelines or code of ethics, or on the APS Guidelines on Ethics, for example.
- Include diverse perspectives and ensure your guidelines support people from . Pay particular attention to the perspectives of those from cultures that may have different assumptions about or definitions of ethics. See the section on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for guidance on how to ensure that diverse voices are represented and heard throughout your department and validate the experiences of members of marginalized groups.
- Ensure that your ethics guidelines address ethical behavior in teaching, research, and other activities within the department, including at social events; and outside the department, such as at professional meetings, community engagement events, and other off-campus work-related events. Address faculty, student, and staff behavior, both positive behavior (e.g., respectful and inclusive treatment of others in the classroom and beyond, celebration of diversity as an asset, and ethical conduct of research) and negative behavior (e.g., bullying, discrimination, sexual harassment, cheating, and plagiarism).
- Circulate draft guidelines before finalizing them, and solicit input from a wide array of department members, including faculty, students, postdocs, and staff. Incorporate feedback and solicit further input as necessary to finalize guidelines.
- Formally adopt guidelines (e.g., by faculty vote), after attending to any institutional requirements (e.g., dean approval).
- Share your ethics guidelines widely; post them in public spaces; and discuss them in classes and departmental meetings, and at events. Ensure that all department members know what is expected of them in terms of ethical behavior, and that violations of the guidelines result in clear and well-understood consequences, such as notification of your ethics office or research integrity office.
- Revisit your ethics guidelines periodically (e.g., every 5 to 10 years) to ensure that they reflect a current understanding of ethics.
