Spanish guide highlights best practices for communicating scientific integrity

The Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology calls for transparency around errors and self-correction to promote a more realistic view of science

Editorial staff

Conceptual illustration of science communication, with two people talking while laboratory icons, graphs, and ideas connect like pieces of a puzzle

Communication about research integrity must go beyond the presentation of scientific results and also include the processes that make them possible. It is essential to show that science produces provisional knowledge that is open to revision, and that uncertainty is not a weakness but a natural step in the advancement of knowledge.

These and other recommendations are brought together in a guide published last December by the Unit for the Advancement of Scientific Communication of the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT).

The document provides guidance for journalists, researchers, communicators, and institutions on how to communicate scientific integrity in a clear, responsible, and effective manner.

Developed as part of the “Science of Scientific Communication” project, the guide highlights that the key strengths of science, such as self-criticism and self-correction, are rarely communicated to the public at large.

The focus of scientific dissemination tends to fall on research results, while the processes that give them legitimacy take a back seat.

At the same time, according to FECYT, communication about ethics is almost always framed in negative contexts—linked to crises and cases of misconduct—often exploited by anti-science movements to discredit science.

In this sense, one of the recommendations is to avoid narratives that present research as a linear path with predictable and inevitable results.

The Spanish foundation also emphasizes the importance of explaining why some research does not achieve the expected results and how this, far from being a failure, contributes to collective learning and the refinement of hypotheses.

Other recommendations from the FECYT guide include:

Contextualizing retractions and their different motivations;
Clearly differentiating between deliberate fraud and honest mistakes;
Presenting uncertainties as natural stages of knowledge.

“By showing that mistakes, revisions, and adjustments are part of the scientific process, communication helps build a more realistic view of science, reducing the risk of simplistic interpretations that could be used to discredit it,” write the authors of the guide published by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology.

Transparency is another key element: not only about potential problems, but also about the measures taken to address them at the individual, institutional, and systemic levels.

Explaining and contextualizing control and self-correction practices—such as peer review, retractions, and reproducibility tests—helps demonstrate how these mechanisms safeguard the reliability of scientific knowledge.

For example, the term “retraction” is often used both to refer to the voluntary withdrawal of an article by its authors after the discovery of an unintentional error, and to the removal of an article when an investigation identifies scientific misconduct.

Clarifying and contextualizing these differences when communicating a retraction is essential, as indiscriminate use of the same term can cause confusion and discourage honest authors from correcting unintentional errors.

Other terms that are often used interchangeably, or even contradictorily, across different scientific disciplines and institutions, are “reproducibility” and “replicability.”

The former refers to the ability to obtain results consistent with a previous study using the same data and methods; the latter—replicability—refers to obtaining identical or compatible results using new data or methods.

These distinctions matter because expectations surrounding replicability are more complex and, in some cases, a lack of replicability may even contribute to the process of scientific discovery.

Fraud versus honest mistake

The FECYT guide also highlights the importance of differentiating between fraud and honest mistake, clarifying how each situation is treated differently and why this distinction is fundamental to preserving the integrity and credibility of science.

Framing scientific errors or failures—such as retractions, mistakes, or cases of irreproducibility—as part of the self-correction process helps to strengthen public trust and understanding, FECYT points out.

Presenting them as a “crisis” in science or in an entire field of knowledge increases mistrust, sensationalism, and politicization.

The authors of the document acknowledge that honest communication about problematic aspects of scientific practice can generate mistrust in the short term.

However, they argue that transparency is essential to prevent misinformation, stimulate improvements in the scientific system, and promote a more accurate understanding of how knowledge advances—not as an infallible process, but one strengthened by criticism, review, and correction.

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