学术诚信、引注规范与研究计划成文指南
节选出处：The Craft of Research - Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams.md ---
V SOME LAST CONSIDERATIONS
P A R T VSome Last Considerations
The Ethics of Research
In the last few hundred pages, we’ve o=ered a lot of practical advice, but almost as much preaching about creating social contracts with your readers, projecting an ethos that will encourage their trust, guarding against biases in collecting and reporting evidence, avoiding plagiarism, and so on. Now we want to share with you the underlying ethical issues that shape our advice, hoping that when you close this book, you’ll give them more thought.
Everything we’ve said about research re?ects our belief that it is a profoundly social activity that connects you both to those who will use your research and to those who might bene>t—or su=er—from that use. But it also connects you and your readers to everyone whose research you used and beyond them to everyone whose research they used. To understand our responsibility to those in that network, now and in the future, we have to move beyond mere technique to think about the ethics of civil communication.
We start with two broad conceptions of the word ethics: the forging of bonds that create a community and the moral choices we face when we act in that community. The term ethical comes from the Greek ethos, meaning either a community’s shared customs or an individual’s character, good or bad. So far, we have focused on the community- building aspects of research, the bonds we create with our readers and our sources. But as does any social activity, T h e E t h i c s o f R e s e a r c h 274 s o m e l a s t c o n s i d e r a t i o n s research challenges us to de>ne our individual ethical principles and then to make choices that honor or violate them.
At >rst glance, a purely academic researcher seems on relatively safe ethical ground—we are less tempted to sacri>ce principle for gain than, say, a Wall Street analyst evaluating a stock that her >rm wants her to push on investors, or a scientist paid by a drug company to “prove” that a product is safe (regardless of whether it works). No teacher will pay you to write a report supporting her views, and you probably won’t have occasion to fake results to gain fame—like the American researcher who became famous (and powerful) for discovering an HIV virus, when he had in fact “borrowed” it from a laboratory in France.
Even so, you will face such choices from the very beginning of your project. Some are the obvious Thou shalt nots:
Ethical researchers do not plagiarize or claim credit for the results of others.
They do not misreport sources, invent data, or fake results.
They do not submit data whose accuracy they don’t trust, unless they say so.
They do not conceal objections that they cannot rebut.
They do not caricature or distort opposing views.
They do not destroy data or conceal sources important for those who follow.
We apply these principles easily enough to obvious cases: the biologist who used india ink to fake “genetic” marks on his mice, the Enron accountants and their auditors at Arthur Andersen who shredded source documents, the government political advisers who erase e- mails, or the student who submits a paper purchased on the Internet.
More challenging are those occasions when ethical principles take us beyond any simple moral Do not to what we should af>rmatively Do. When we think about ethical choices in that way, we move beyond simple con?icts between our own self- interest and the honest pursuit of truth, or between what we want for ourselves and what is good for or at least not harmful to others. If reporting research is genuinely a collaborative e=ort between readers and writers to >nd the best solution to shared problems, then the challenge is to >nd ways to create ethical partnerships to make ethical choices (what we traditionally call character) that can help build ethical communities.
Such a challenge raises more questions than we can answer here. Some of those questions have answers that we all agree on; others are controversial. The three of us answer some of them di=erently. But one thing we agree on is that research o=ers every researcher an ethical invitation that, when not just dutifully accepted but embraced, can serve the best interests of both researchers and their readers.
When you create, however brie?y, a community of shared understanding and interest, you set a standard for your work higher than any you could set for yourself alone.
When you explain to others why your research should change their understanding and beliefs, you must examine not only your own understanding and interests, but your responsibility to them if you convince them to change theirs.
When you acknowledge your readers’ alternative views, including their strongest objections and reservations, you move closer not just to more reliable knowledge, better understanding, and sounder beliefs, but to honoring the dignity and human needs of your readers.
In other words, when you do research and report it as a conversation among equals working toward greater knowledge and better understanding, the ethical demands you place on yourself should redound to the bene>t of all—even when we cannot all agree on a common good. When you decline that conversation, you risk harming yourself and possibly those who depend on your work.
It is this concern for the integrity of the common work of a 276 s o m e l a s t c o n s i d e r a t i o n s community that underscores why researchers condemn plagiarism so strongly. Plagiarism is theft, but of more than words. By not acknowledging a source, the plagiarist steals the modest recognition that honest researchers should receive, the respect that a researcher spends a lifetime struggling to earn. And that weakens the community as a whole, by reducing the value of research to those who follow.
That is true in all research communities, including the undergraduate classroom. The student plagiarist steals not only from his sources, but from his colleagues by making their work seem lesser by comparison to what was bought or stolen. When such intellectual thievery becomes common, the community grows suspicious, then distrustful, then cynical—Everyone does it. I’ll fall behind if I don’t. Teachers must then worry as much about not being tricked as about teaching and learning. What’s worse, the plagiarist compromises her own education and so steals from the larger society that devotes its resources to training her and her generation to do reliable work later, work that the community will depend on.
In short, when you report your research ethically, you join a community in a search for some common good. When you respect sources, preserve and acknowledge data that run against your results, assert claims only as strongly as warranted, acknowledge the limits of your certainty, and meet all the other ethical obligations on your report, you move beyond gaining a grade or other material goods—you earn the larger bene>t that comes from creating a bond with your readers. You discover that research focused on the best interests of others is also in your own.
A Postscript for Teachers
In this postscript we want to make explicit what has been implicit throughout. We hope you will join in an e=ort to improve the national “research scene.” Too many teachers of undergraduates say, I’ve given up teaching the research paper. Colleagues tell us that the ones they get are boring patchworks, that students aren’t up to the task, that in any event the hard- copy research paper is an relic of pre- digital days, even that no one but ivory- tower academics does research anymore.
We think otherwise, of course. We think doing research is the best way to learn to read and think critically. And we know for a fact that the vast majority of our students will have careers in which, if they do not do their own research, they will have to evaluate and depend on the research of others. We also know that most of that research will be in written form, even if it happens to be delivered online. And we can think of no way to prepare for that responsibility better than doing research of one’s own.
We wrote this book for those who agree, and believe—or will at least consider—two propositions:
- Students learn to do research well and report it clearly when they take the perspective of their readers and of the community whose values and practices de>ne competent research and its reporting.
A P o s t s c r i p t f o r Te a c h e r s278 s o m e l a s t c o n s i d e r a t i o n s
- They learn to manage an important part of that mental and social process when they understand how a few key formal features of their reports in?uence how their readers read and judge them.
These two propositions, we believe, are closely related. By understanding the complementary processes of reading and writing, students plan, perform, and report their research better. They can use the features that readers expect to guide themselves through not only the process of drafting, but all the stages of their project. And by understanding what their readers look for in a report, they learn to read the reports of others more critically. The two processes, reading and writing, are mutually supporting.
THE RISKS AND LIMITATIONS OF IMPOSING FORMAL RULES Emphasizing formal matters, though, carries a risk, especially with new researchers. It is easy to trivialize formal structures into empty drills. Those who teach dancers only to hit their marks or pianists only to >nd the right keys deprive students of the deepest pleasures of dance and music. Those who teach research as if it were merely learning the proper forms for footnotes and bibliography deprive their students of the pleasures of discovery, driving them to join those countless students turned o= by Gradgrind formulae, students who might otherwise have blessed the world with their own good research.
If students are shown how to approach them in the right spirit, the features of an argument become not empty forms to be mindlessly >lled, but answers to questions that encourage hard thinking. They help students recognize what is important in the relationship between a researcher, her sources, her disciplinary colleagues and readers—a crucial prerequisite to creative and original research.
Forms empty of meaning encourage empty imitation, especially when teachers fail to create in their classrooms a rhetorical context that dramatizes for students their social role as researchers, even if at >rst only in simulation or role- playing. No textbook can fully create that context, because it requires a class experience that only imaginative teachers can orchestrate.
Only a teacher, understanding his unique students, can devise assignments that create situations whose social dynamic gives point and purpose to research and whose expectations students can recognize and understand. The less experience students have, the more social support teachers must provide before their students can use formal structures in productive ways.
ON ASSIGNMENT SCENARIOS: CREATING A GROUND FOR CURIOSITY Teachers have found many ways to construct research assignments that give students that necessary support. The most successful have these features:
- Good assignments establish outcomes beyond a product to be evaluated. Good teachers ask students to raise a question or problem that at least they want to resolve, and to support that resolution with reliable and relevant evidence. Good research assignments then ask students to translate that private interest into a public one, so that they can experience, or at least imagine, readers who need the understanding that only they can provide.
The best assignments ask students to write for those who actually need to know or understand something better. Those readers might be a transient community of researchers that a problem creates, as when students do their research for a client outside of class. A senior design class, for example, might address a problem of a local company or civic organization; a music class might write program notes; a history class might investigate the origins of some part of their university or an institution in their local community.
Less experienced students might write for their classmates, but they might also write for students in another class who could actually use the information that a beginning researcher could provide. They might do preliminary research for those senior design students or for students in a graduate seminar; or they might even write reports back to students still in high school.
Next best are assignments that simulate such situations, in which students assume that other students or a client or even other researchers have a problem that the student researcher can 280 s o m e l a s t c o n s i d e r a t i o n s resolve. Even in large classes, students can work in small groups whose members serve as readers with interests that beginning researchers can reasonably address.
Good assignments help students learn about their readers. Most students have trouble imagining readers whom they have never met and whose situation they have never experienced. Biology students with no knowledge or experience working with a government agency will be unlikely to write a plausible report that meets the concerns of a state EPA administrator. But teachers can help by urging students to imagine those distant readers. Alternatively, they can turn the class into its own audience by letting students decide what problems need solving, what questions need answering. If students can de>ne the problems they’re interested in, they will make the best possible readers for one another’s research.
Good assignments create scenarios that are rich in contextual information. When students write to resolve the problems of readers known and accessible to them, the assignment presents a scenario rich in detail. Students can investigate, interrogate, and analyze the situation for as long as time and ingenuity allow.
But when it’s not practical to locate the project in a real context, the assignment should create as much of that context as possible. It is seldom possible to anticipate everything students need to know about such a scenario, so it is important to make analysis and discussion of it a part of the writing process. Only when students are working in a social context do they have meaningful choices and good reasons to make them. Only then are those choices rhetorically signi>cant. And only when writers can make rhetorically signi>cant choices will they understand that at the heart of every real writing project is the anticipation of their readers’ responses. When students have no choices because their project has no rhetorical “scene” and so is only a mechanical drill, doing research and writing it up become merely make- work—for you as much as for them.
Again we stress the importance of lively discussion among the students, either in class, if the class is small enough, or in subgroups if the class is large.
Good assignments provide interim readers. Few professional researchers call a report >nished before they have solicited responses, something students need even more. Encourage students to solicit early responses from colleagues, friends, family, even from you. Getting responses is easier if you build opportunities into the assignment itself. Other students can play this role reasonably well, but not if they think that their task is just “editing”— which for them often means rearranging a sentence here and >xing a misspelling there. Have student responders work through some of the steps in chapters 14–17; you can even create teams of responders, each with responsibility for speci>c features of the text. Those who provide interim responses must participate in the scenario as imagined readers.
As with any real project, good assignments give students time and a schedule of interim deadlines. Research is messy, so it does no good to march students through it lockstep: (1) Select topic, (2) state thesis, (3) write outline, (4) collect bibliography, (5) read and take notes, (6) write report. That caricatures real research. But students need some framework, a schedule of tasks that helps them monitor their progress. They need time for false starts and blind alleys, for revision and reconsideration. They need interim deadlines and stages for sharing and criticizing their progress. Those stages can re?ect the various sequences outlined in this book.
RECOGNIZING AND TOLERATING THE INEVITABLE MESSINESS OF LEARNING Students also seriously—sometimes desperately—need other kinds of support, especially recognition of what can be expected of them and tolerance for the predictable missteps of even experienced researchers. Beginners behave in awkward ways, taking suggestions and principles as in?exible rules that they apply mechanically. They work through a topic to a question to the online catalog to a few Web sites marching on and on to a feeble conclusion, not because they lack imagination or creativity, but because they are struggling to acquire a skill that to them is surpassingly strange. Such awkwardness is an inevitable stage in learning any 282 s o m e l a s t c o n s i d e r a t i o n s skill. It passes, but too often only after they have moved on to other classes.
We urge you not to be troubled when a whole class of beginning students produces reports that look alike. We three have had to learn to be patient with students, as we wait for the delayed grati>cation that comes when the learners arrive at genuine originality—knowing it will likely come when we are no longer there to see it.
We try to assure students that even if they do not solve their problem, they succeed if they can pose it in a way that convinces us that it is new—at least to them—and arguably needs a solution. Proving that there is a problem to be solved often requires more research and more critical a