Young physicists say ethics rules are being ignored

Ethical violations in physics are just as prevalent now as they were 20 years ago, finds a survey of early-career physicists and graduate students — even though awareness of ethics policies has become more widespread.

The study, conducted in 2020 by the American Physical Society (APS) and published in this month’s Physics Today¹, reveals alarming rates of unethical research practices and harassment in the physics community, including data manipulation and physical abuse.

Although the results show that institutions have made efforts to educate researchers on ethical issues, there has been “no substantive change in the power relations that were leading to such awful outcomes”, says Michael Marder, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the report. “I think the routine is for things to be ignored and business to go back to usual — that’s what we documented. So, the question is, how can we stop that?”

The 2020 survey was a follow-up to an initial survey on ethics education among early-career APS members that took place in 2003. Marder and his two colleagues wanted to evaluate whether ethics awareness and practice in physics had improved since then.

The authors received 1,390 responses from early-career physicists and 2,829 from physics graduate students, a 30% response rate. The survey repeated the same questions that were used in 2003, asking the junior researchers whether they had witnessed ethical violations in any of eight categories, from plagiarism to falsifying data.

In the 2020 survey, 71% of respondents said that they were aware of the code of conduct at their institutions, compared with only 22% in the 2003 survey. But the counts of violations witnessed by the respondents in most misconduct categories were similar to those in the initial survey. “That counterbalances the improvement in awareness and education on ethics,” says Frances Houle, a biophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and co-author of the study.

The later survey reveals that the incidence of data manipulation increased to 7.3% from only 3.9% in the 2003 survey. And 12.5% of early-career physicists said that they had felt pressure to commit ethical violations, compared with 7.7% in 2003.

The authors attribute this to pressure from supervisors; pressure to publish quickly or in high-profile journals; and pressure to source funding, as described by the junior scientists in the open-ended questions. “The pressure to manipulate data or to exaggerate … is really detrimental to the science,” says co-author Kate Kirby, a physicist and former chief executive officer of APS. Addressing this issue is a responsibility that should be shared between institutions, physics departments and publishers, she adds.

The 2020 survey included extra questions on mistreatment and harassment. The authors received 3,577 responses from early-career APS members and graduate students. Of these, 795 identified as women, 2,348 as men and 37 as neither; 397 preferred not to identify their gender.

According to the study, women were five times more likely to feel that they had been mistreated or ignored, or subjected to inappropriate comments of a sexual nature. “These harassments are coming in forms that one might not initially think of,” says Ramon Barthelemy, a physicist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. “It’s exclusion. It’s not being included in grant projects. It’s common, subtle insults and slights,” he adds.

For Sarah Johnson, a physicist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, an unconscious bias plays a part in these mistreatments. “When we ask somebody to picture physicists, they think of Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking. They picture a man — they don’t picture a woman,” she says. So, there’s an unconscious feeling that a woman doesn’t belong in the world of physics, she adds.

The study also reveals that 15% of the respondents who identified as women reported having been touched without their permission, compared with 2% of those identifying as men. And 8.3% of the women said that they had been physically harassed. Most respondents said that they had not reported the harassment to their institutions, but more than half of those who had were not satisfied with the institutional response. “We haven’t built institutional capacity to handle this at many different levels,” says Marder.

The authors suggest that the APS adopt new measures to highlight accountability for ethical violations. “But until it’s put into some kind of policy, I fear that it’s just a platitude,” says Zahra Hazari, a physicist at Florida International University in Miami. What’s needed is “not just setting policy, but setting policy that can quickly and efficiently be acted upon”, she adds.

The authors explain that discrimination and harassment are often the result of unequal power dynamics in academia. The future of junior researchers is “totally beholden to their adviser … so they can’t rock the boat in any way,” says Kirby. The authors recommend a shared leadership model, wherein the assessment of graduate students and postdocs is made by a departmental committee instead of being reliant solely on the opinion of an adviser. “That recommendation is actually incredibly powerful, and is one that does take a lot of work but can be easily implemented at institutions across the board,” says Barthelemy.

But “harassment is not just top-down”, adds Houle. Responses to the open-ended questions in the survey reveal that peer-to-peer harassment is much more prevalent, she adds.

The authors suggest developing educational materials that are relevant to physicists. But some other scientists doubt that this would be effective. What would make a difference is to require all students to take a course in ethics that included training on professional boundaries and how to treat colleagues respectfully, says Johnson.

The authors also propose diversifying the culture of physics to improve inclusion and reduce the incidence of harassment and discrimination. But “culture can only change if people who are not enculturated are driving the change,” says Hazari. “It’s not just about check boxes of more people of colour within the same paradigm — we have to change the paradigm,” she adds.