OBaS – Science is …

Ponter and his daughter discuss the question what science is precisely. What do you think that science is? Is history a science? 

Academic research can be split up in several branches. These include:
· Social Sciences (Psychology, Sociology, etc.)
· Natural Sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Molecular Life Sciences, etc.)
· Arts (Literature, Law, Philosophy, etc.)

And depending on the meaning of science, what does scientific integrity mean? Does it only affect people involved in the branches that belong to science? The ALLEA code of conduct evades this question and it is called the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity and hence it is aimed at all researchers, whether they conduct research in the natural sciences or in the arts. In Upright we interpret scientific integrity in this broad sense and use the notions scientific integrity and research integrity interchangeably.

Regardless of the distinction what science is precisely, different branches encounter different issues of research integrity. For instance, in the natural sciences, data is a key concept. Many violations of scientific integrity in the field of natural sciences, as a result, concern data issues, for instance data manipulation or fabricating data entirely. In most of the humanities, however, data plays a far less essential role and an important transgression of scientific integrity is plagiarism.