RESEARCH

A recent survey conducted by the Privacy Consulting Group was presented at a meeting of the Institute of Medicine's (IOM) committee investigating the impact of the privacy rule on research.

The survey results of 2400 adults indicated:

• 8% of respondents who were asked to participate in a study declined due to fear that their information would not be kept private (30%).
• 13% did not want, under any circumstances, researchers to contact them or use their personal health information.
• Only 11% strongly agreed that researchers can usually be trusted to protect the confidentiality of medical and health records of reserach subjects.

Southern Illinois University (SIU) President, Glenn Poshard, was found to have committed "inadvertent plagiarism" in his doctoral disseration back in 1984. The seven-person SIU faculty committee noted that the graduate student handbook at the time did not include a definition of plagiarism. The committee recommended that Poshard be given the opportunity to correct the "incorrect practices" in the dissertation and that he face no further disciplinary action.

Three other plagiarism cases at SIU have recently made headlines. Administrators at both the Carbondale and Edwardsville campuses were identified as having copied sections of a strategic plan and a speech from the work of others. Carbondale's chancellor was asked to step down, and the Edwardsville chancellor apologized for his actions.

Supporters of Chris Dussold, an assistant professor of finance, are credited with uncovering the upper administration's plagiarism problems. Dussold was fired, apparently without the benefit of a faculty committee review, for copying a two-page document he included in his tenure review package. He is suing the university.

Case Western Reserve University defines plagiarism as "the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results or words without giving appropriate credit." Plagiarism is included in the definition of research misconduct.

Link to Case's Research Misconduct Policy: http://ora.ra.cwru.edu/research/orc/Attachments/Case%20HRPP/ResearchMisconductPolicy1-20-06.pdf.