From time to time examples of scientific fraud come to light and raise questions about the integrity of scientific endeavour. The most well-known example of recent years must surely be South Korean stem cell biologist Hwang Woo-Suk, whose ground-breaking discoveries in the field of therapeutic cloning were exposed as bogus (In addition to his science [...]
You know when you’ve been viper-ed
A tweet this morning from @jon_scott alerted me to the fact that sometime over the weekend, the University of Leicester has been visited by the PR machine for the Viper service. Paving slabs had been stencilled with the company’s logo and web address. Rather ingeniously, the marketeers have jet-washed the image rather than painting it [...]
Promoting the ethical conduct of science
Back in 2004, Sir David King (at the time, the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser) initiated a discussion about generating a Code of Conduct for Scientists. The consultation process led, in 2006, to the publication of Rigour, respect and responsibility: a universal ethical code for scientists. None of the contents was particularly surprising or radical but [...]
Helping students improve their referencing practice
Appropriate citation of source documents is a key element in all academic writing. As anyone involved in the teaching of undergraduates will know, however, suitable ways of organising reference lists, and conventions for highlighting within the new text the points at which the sources have been used, are not always intuitive.
Colleagues and students may therefore be interested [...]
Preventing and Designing out Plagiarism
On 8th April 2008, the University of Leicester played host to conference organised by the Centre for Bioscience of the Higher Education Academy (Editorial note: apologies it took so long to get this post up – it was an excellent day conference so I hope you’ll find the material still relevant. More notes can be [...]
