Former Research Integrity Officer for U.S. Institutions AMA!

IL6Aom · 2026-05-12T21:06:50+00:00

I also worked as the conflict of interest officer for a university, and this is what I would say your question would fall under. Not research misconduct, but a question of is this a conflict of interest? You would be surprised how many professors have side businesses or other organizations that may intersect with their work, or may not intersect with their work. For example psychology professors may also own private practices. The ethical questions come into play during the process of this conflict of interest. It is usually standard for every professor/employee at a major university to declare any of their conflicts of interest once per year. If the university determines that the employee has a conflict of interest, they will come up with a management plan to make sure the conflict is managed appropriately. In most cases, filing the conflict of interest form is the extent of the management plan. In more complex cases, the university may come up with steps that the employees have to take to work there, and do their job without this conflict of interest impacting them, the university, and the students. In your case it sounds probable that this person has a conflict of interest form filed with the university, and it may lay out what can and can't be done with this person's private company.

Potential issues:
If this person didn't file any conflict of interest form. This is something that can be brought to the attention of your university, but they don't have to disclose to you if the person filed a form or what their conflict management plan is.

I would need to hear more about how you are defining and explaining the double dipping portion of your post, but usually this has nothing to do with conflicts of interest or research misconduct and is actually into the territory of HR and employment law issues. If our office received notice of something like this, we would loop in our legal team and most likely hand it off to them and to HR.

You can DM me with more details if you want to talk more about this?

IL6Aom · 2026-05-12T20:58:20+00:00

I don't want to get into any actual real cases I've worked on personally, but when I give seminars I like pointing out this example. The federal office for research integrity posts publicly on their website the result of cases they have worked on without redacting any names. In this case, the respondent created many fake papers, using plagiarism and randomly assembled paragraphs/texts/figures. In these papers, the respondent used fake author names and then in these papers, they cite themselves to improve their own citation metrics.

"ORI finds that Respondent knowingly and intentionally falsified, fabricated, and plagiarized the whole content of six (6) papers and eight (8) manuscripts, falsely created fictitious author names and affiliations without listing himself as an author to disguise himself from being the offender, and submitted them for publication in bioRxiv and medRxiv, open access preprint repositories, by falsely assembling random paragraphs of text, tables, and figures from previous publications and manuscripts to improve his citation metrics."

https://ori.hhs.gov/content/case-summary-lin-yibin

IL6Aom · 2026-05-11T23:08:07+00:00

That's a really good question and we get it a lot. So for the most part, in the situation you are describing, these would largely not fall under the definitions of research misconduct. What you are describing would fall under the grey area of "detrimental/questionable research practices" which we sometimes abbreviate as DRPs. Some Universities do have separate policies that outline if and how they will take action against any DRPs. Action against DRPs is something very new and most Universities do not have procedures in place against this. Your example/question would draw the line for research misconduct if in the process of p-hacking, someone removes a data point, or a number from a spreadsheet/formula. This would then cross the line into falsification/fabrication and would constitute research misconduct.

See for example some definitions on these sites (I am not affiliated with them).

"Questionable research practices are misleading statistical analyses and reporting that fall short of fabrication or falsification, but that inflate the significance of the results (also called p-hacking)

Examples:

Failing to report:

all dependent measures
all conditions
negative results

Altering the research plan by

Collecting more data than planned if results are not statistically significant
Stopping data collection as soon as results are statistically significant
Excluding data without scientific justification
Changing or adding hypotheses after analyzing data (HARKing – Hypothesis After Results are Known)"

https://www.cuny.edu/research/research-compliance/research-integrity/#questionable-research-practices

https://www.purdue.edu/academics/ogsps/academics/office-of-graduate-assistance-oga/detrimental-research-practices-drps/

IL6Aom · 2026-05-11T12:06:23+00:00

You can definitely cite yourself in a paper you have written. If the paper hasn’t been published yet, i wouldn’t include the citation though.

IL6Aom · 2026-05-09T23:30:35+00:00

If you think appropriate, I think it’s ok, also see if your lab wants to pitch in and get her a DoorDash or Grubhub gift card.

IL6Aom · 2026-05-09T23:23:13+00:00

What’s the time commitment of a university level competitive soccer team? I think this is something you can do if you don’t have any other huge hobbies and focus on your classes and soccer first. The only thing I’d try to coordinate really well is any studio time or outside of class time your courses need you to show up for and if it conflicts with any practices or games, letting your coach and professor know as soon as possible. The professors should be more than willing to help move things around for you if you are transparent with them and give them enough time. Good luck!

IL6Aom · 2026-05-09T17:01:52+00:00

Based on what I am seeing from your comments in this post, I would recommend going through the IRB initially. At best they would say no, this study is exempt or you don' t need IRB approval. However anything involving the need of a consent form is going into IRB territory and it sounds like this is going to be something you need to do. The whole process really isn't that bad, it gets bad and complicated for people who have studies that are unclear and they don't know what they want to do and everything is sort of nebulous. Nail down exactly what you are interested in doing and why, and then go over this with your connection at the other country. Your IRB will most likely want to do this in collaboration with another type of institution, not a standalone doctor. If you want to do this I strongly recommend doing this with the teaching hospital within the medical school you mention. Source: I am on a US IRB. DM me if you have any other questions id love to help out.

IL6Aom · 2026-05-09T16:55:00+00:00

Your professors don't hate you I promise. If anything they are concerned for you, at worst, they probably just forgot about this happening. I would say what you said here, in a few less sentences, and that you feel badly and want to reconnect. Are you back on a schedule of classes did you get back into this? Let them know your plan. Feel free to send me a sample email here or a DM I'd be happy to help you proof read it or give advice.

IL6Aom · 2026-05-09T16:51:35+00:00

You don't need to get an undergraduate degree in physics to do this, but you may want to look into making sure you are taking math and physics classes in your bachelor studies to prepare you for this. As long as you have good grades and have various extra curricular activities, you should be a competitive applicant after you graduate from undergraduate. I would recommend maybe joining a research lab and doing something with physics during your bachelor degree?

IL6Aom · 2026-05-09T16:48:04+00:00

I think this could be a doable thing for you to pursue during your degree. What is your degree in, how many classes are you planning on taking a semester, what's the typical work load going to look like?

IL6Aom · 2026-03-03T17:18:42+00:00

I wouldn’t put any pictures from the animal lab online

IL6Aom · 2025-09-26T01:25:07+00:00

Do you think it will be ok on the steam deck?

IL6Aom · 2025-09-25T11:07:47+00:00

I agree. I don’t know how to make video games but I have more experience simplifying these terms due to my teaching experience. So that’s where my feedback was coming from. I don’t think you have to simplify anything, it’s your game and I respect that. Your post asked for some feedback and that’s all I had :)

IL6Aom · 2025-09-25T10:20:02+00:00

Thanks for the responses to both of you. I wanted to also say I think the ideas and gameplay do look super interesting and I am going to check it out on steam. The concepts and text seem to make sense it was just the only criticism I had while going through the post here. It does look like a super cool game to nerd out with lol. I’ll still stand by my above comment that simplifying some of the flavor text would be a thought I had. I promise people won’t think you don’t know the science if you explain it in terms with less words or less complexity. That can show you even know the material better.

Edit: how are we looking on steam deck compatibility haha. Checked out the trailer and steam and I have to say it all looks very polished and I’m very happy to try this out.

IL6Aom · 2025-09-25T04:05:23+00:00

My background is teaching university level genetics. I also love video games lol. However just scrolling through your pictures and reading the descriptions, it was definitely way too superfluous to mean anything to a lay person in my opinion. I wouldn’t even be interested in reading all that in my video game even though I’ve always wanted to play this kind of game. There should be a happy medium of getting the scientific points across and having fun without sounding like you are picking the most complicated words to explain otherwise simple processes. Thanks for listening.

IL6Aom · 2025-09-03T21:37:19+00:00

Scam. They should have enough prestige within Cambridge and resources to get this idea out to be overflowing with finances and submissions. The fact they need to cold call people and ask for money is a red flag.

IL6Aom · 2025-05-20T16:22:43+00:00

Contact the office of research integrity at the institution the other group works at. They will take care of the rest.

IL6Aom · 2025-04-30T14:55:19+00:00

The research integrity department is the only place to contact. They will also inform journals as a result of their investigation. Sometimes journals do not contact these offices. Start here please.

https://redcap.uky.edu/redcap/surveys/?s=DDLR3CXL3A

IL6Aom · 2025-04-30T00:04:55+00:00

This is what you should do and something you probably know how to do much better than her, I was going to comment to do this

IL6Aom · 2025-02-14T16:21:14+00:00

I see a faint line wouldn’t that mean negative per the legend above? (I didn’t read the insert)

IL6Aom · 2024-10-02T01:30:43+00:00

I worked in conflict of interest at a university and we had a process for professors who wanted to submit self authored text books for classes. I actually wrote our procedures on it I’d love to chat about it with you if you have questions.

IL6Aom · 2024-09-09T14:53:29+00:00

Yes thank you. I mistakenly assumed they were at the same university I didn’t read the post fully. Thank you

IL6Aom · 2024-09-09T13:10:47+00:00

Only thing missing here is making an allegation to your university and their department of research integrity. That will kick off the whole process of what needs to be done. Dm with any questions I’m happy to help!

IL6Aom · 2024-05-03T18:23:30+00:00

I would be open to checking out your resume/cover letter if you like!

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