Fairness in Research Integrity Guidelines Across the World: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

The topic of ‘research fairness’ is receiving growing attention in Research Integrity (RI) initiatives, with increasing acknowledgement of the relationship between RI and fairness concerns such as diversity equity and inclusion (DEI) and responsible collaborations. However, initiatives usually neglect addressing structural injustices and their relationship to RI. Furthermore, RI standards are mostly set in economically powerful countries, but are applied globally, posing a risk of ethical imperialism and reinforcing existing colonial hierarchies. This study examined whether, and if so how, fairness is understood in RI guidance documents across the world. Three aspects of fairness were analyzed: addressing injustices, attention to colonial hierarchies and DEI. We conducted a scoping review to collect national and international RI guidance documents targeted at researchers. Conducting a search of grey and published literature, we included 66 documents. We used Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to assess how fairness is constructed in these documents and to analyze implicit and explicit power dynamics, silences, and assumptions. RI documents originated mostly from European countries, with limited representation from Africa and Latin America. The majority of the included documents referred to fairness only as procedural, covering issues such as fair authorship, peer review, and misconduct investigations. While a large number of guidance documents addressed DEI principles, many employed “diversity” as a superficial concept, while few proposed concrete measures to counter discrimination and systemic inequities. In general, few documents explicitly mentioned issues of injustice, such as knowledge and material extractivism, epistemic injustice, and socioeconomic inequities. Also, few codes explicitly confronted colonial hierarchies, but those that did came from colonized nations. Some documents acknowledged diverse knowledge systems and ethical frameworks. Yet even these often reflected assumptions of colonial hierarchies in their language, for instance portraying Indigenous and marginalized groups as passive agents and receivers of research rather than as active groups capable of conducting research. Overall, most European RI frameworks tended to frame fairness without taking into account structural injustices, colonial hierarchies and DEI systematically, reinforcing watered down, procedural rather than structural visions of fairness. These findings show that fairness is not addressed seriously by most RI initiatives.