Sven Ulpts
From the Researcher to the Integrity of Knowledge Production
In the context of concerns about irreproducibility and a rising prevalence of research misconduct or questionable research practices, recent discourse about what constitutes good research conduct has proliferated across all forms of media. Under the umbrella terms research integrity and responsible conduct of research, policy and guidelines are designed to steer and educate researchers, as well as stakeholders like journals and universities, towards specific ideals of good conduct. However, it largely remains unclear how official public and policy notions of responsible conduct of research or research integrity actually relate to the lived experiences, preferences, and practices of researchers across the research landscape under diverse conditions. The dissertation presents an emic perspective on research integrity, capturing the researchers’ notions of ‘good research’ from within their laboratories. The inside perspective that I present is based on a multisite lab ethnography in six cognitive and social science laboratories in the Netherlands, Germany, and the UK. Two additional contributions are an investigation and discussion of the relationship between Open Science and research integrity as well as the potential contributions of classical science studies to research on research integrity.