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ESSAYS ON RESEARCH -- THE ROLE OF GROUP DYNAMICS IN SCIENTIFIC INCONSISTENCIES

Wednesday, 19th of June 2013

• ESSAYS ON RESEARCH -- THE ROLE OF GROUP DYNAMICS IN SCIENTIFIC INCONSISTENCIES

Citation: Rosmalen JGM, Oldehinkel AJ (2011) The Role of Group Dynamics in Scientific Inconsistencies: A Case Study of a Research Consortium. PLoS Med 8(12): e1001143. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001143

Published: December 13, 2011

Copyright: © 2011 Rosmalen, Oldehinkel. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: TRAILS has been financially supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research NWO (Medical Research Council program grant GB-MW 940-38-011; ZonMW Brainpower grant 100-001-004; ZonMw Risk Behavior and Dependence grants 60-60600-98-018 and 60-60600-97-118; ZonMw Culture and Health grant 261-98-710; Social Sciences Council medium-sized investment grants GB-MaGW 480-01-006 and GB-MaGW 480-07-001; Social Sciences Council project grants GB-MaGW 457-03-018, GB-MaGW 452-04-314, and GB-MaGW 452-06-004; NWO large-sized investment grant 175.010.2003.005), the Sophia Foundation for Medical Research (projects 301 and 393), the Dutch Ministry of Justice (WODC), the European Science Foundation (EuroSTRESS project FP-006), and the participating universities. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Abbreviations: TRAILS, TRacking Adolescents Individual Lives Survey

Provenance: Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed

Summary Points below; full text is at http://www.ploscollections.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001143

• Findings reported in published articles often provide an unrealistic picture of the data that are actually generated in scientific research.
• This is partly due to ineffective group dynamics within research groups and collaborations.
• These practices may be improved by having clearly defined overall goals, explicitly described roles and responsibilities for all coauthors, and a rational choice of methodological strategies.