ArticleBMC medical ethics2026
Shaping research integrity: Perceptions of mentorship and questionable research practices among undergraduate dental students and mentors in Karachi, Pakistan.
Article in BMC medical ethics, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundQuestionable research practices (QRPs) undermine research integrity and may become normalized early during academic training. In undergraduate dental research, students' ethical conduct is shaped not only by formal instruction but also by mentorship, supervision, hierarchy, and institutional culture. However, limited qualitative evidence is available from Pakistan on how undergraduate dental students and mentors perceive ethical challenges and the role of mentorship in navigating QRPs.
methodsAn exploratory descriptive qualitative study was conducted in two dental teaching institutions in Karachi, Pakistan: one public-sector and one private-sector institution. In-depth interviews were conducted with undergraduate dental students and faculty mentors involved in undergraduate research supervision. Participants were purposively selected to capture variation by participant role, institution type, gender, year of study, and supervisory experience. Separate semi-structured interview guides were developed for students and mentors, pilot-tested, and refined before data collection. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis, informed by Bandura's Social Learning Theory. Reporting was guided by the COREQ and SRQR principles.
resultsFour themes were developed: ethical awareness with limited procedural confidence; QRPs as normalized research shortcuts; mentorship as ethical scaffolding and a source of silence; and institutional systems as conditions that enable or constrain research integrity. Participants described basic awareness of ethical principles such as informed consent, confidentiality, plagiarism avoidance, and ethics approval. However, they also described difficulty applying these principles to authorship decisions, field procedures, data interpretation, and institutional review processes. Improper authorship, selective reporting, interpretive distortion, and procedural shortcuts were commonly discussed as QRPs. Mentorship was perceived as supportive when mentors were accessible, explicit, and ethically engaged, but hierarchical relationships and inconsistent supervisory engagement sometimes discouraged students from questioning questionable practices. Institutional barriers included limited practical ethics training, weak procedural support, productivity pressure, and a lack of safe reporting pathways.
conclusionThis study does not establish a causal or statistical relationship between mentorship and QRPs. Rather, it shows how undergraduate dental students and mentors perceive research integrity as being shaped through everyday interactions among ethical awareness, mentor-mentee dynamics, hierarchy, and institutional culture. The findings suggest that structured ethics teaching, clearer authorship guidance, reflective mentorship, and safe reporting mechanisms may strengthen undergraduate dental research integrity, although these interventions require further evaluation.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.