Because of the important role that mentors play in the development of young scientists, trainees depend on their mentors for training, support, and career guidance. Unfortunately, “absentee mentoring”, as Sandra Titus from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services referenced, is becoming the norm. An observation from the Forum was the limited awareness of the issues surrounding scholarly integrity among young
researchers. Outstanding researchers at the beginning of their careers as scientists reported that they had never encountered nor considered the range of issues encompassed, for example, in the code of ethics. Therefore, emerging from the Forum was a suggestion that institutions offer short courses to incoming graduate students on what are scholarly integrity and the responsibility of scientists to uphold standards of responsible conduct in research.
In fact, many disciplinary societies, government agencies, and foundations are addressing the importance of integrity in the conduct of research by developing their own educational protocols. Scientific societies, such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society, have developed materials to help educate their community about integrity in research. For example, AAAS has educational videos on Integrity in Scientific Research. [4] With the variety of efforts that have been made to foster integrity in scholarship, we must ask why there are still frequent ethical violations occurring in conducting research. Do these education efforts come too late in the professional development of the scholar? Should education about the development and maintenance of scholarly integrity be part of the curriculum? These kinds of initiatives do take place in some disciplines (such as psychology), where even basic data collection often requires interaction with the general public, but ethical issues are arguably no less important in other disciplines where interaction between scientist and society may initially be more indirect.