Dataset of research misconduct knowledge and associated factors among nurses in China: A national cross-sectional survey

Engagement in research misconduct by nurses may results in professional misconduct in the clinical setting, thereby jeopardizing the quality of patient care. We still know little about the research misconduct situation among nurses. Previous attempts also hardly reflected participants’ actual knowledge level of research misconduct. This data article presents a novel dataset of a cross-sectional study investigating the research misconduct knowledge level and associated factors among nurses in China. Between March 2018 and March 2021, a national survey was conducted at 200 tertiary hospitals in 25 provinces. A multistage sampling (province, hospital, and participants) was applied and 4,112 nurses were recruited in this study. Participants completed questionnaires online through smartphones scanning a Quick Response (QR) code. The survey consisted of demographic characteristics, research activities, scientific misconduct knowledge, perceived reasons for research misconduct and perceived consequences for research misconduct. Data from 3,640 nurses were reserved in the dataset after data cleaning. This dataset may provide comprehensive information on research misconduct knowledge and associated factors, and important evidence for designing research integrity continuing training for nurses.

a b s t r a c t Engagement in research misconduct by nurses may results in professional misconduct in the clinical setting, thereby jeopardizing the quality of patient care. We still know little about the research misconduct situation among nurses. Previous attempts also hardly reflected participants' actual knowledge level of research misconduct. This data article presents a novel dataset of a cross-sectional study investigating the research misconduct knowledge level and associated factors among nurses in China. Between March 2018 and March 2021, a national survey was conducted at 200 tertiary hospitals in 25 provinces. A multistage sampling (province, hospital, and participants) was applied and 4,112 nurses were recruited in this study. Participants completed questionnaires online through smartphones scanning a Quick Response (QR) code. The survey consisted of demographic characteristics, research activities, scientific misconduct knowledge, perceived reasons for research misconduct and perceived consequences for research misconduct. Data from 3,640 nurses were reserved in the dataset after data cleaning. This dataset may provide comprehensive information on research misconduct knowledge and associated factors, and important evidence for designing research integrity continuing training for nurses.

Value of the Data
• This data help acquire knowledge of research misconduct knowledge level among nurse in China. • This data enables researchers to further investigate the factors that influence research misconduct knowledge. • This data can provide evidence for designing research integrity continuing training for nurses.
• This data can assist hospital managers and policy makers in taking effective measures to improve research misconduct knowledge of nurses.

Data Description
Many previous studies have reported the prevalence of research misconduct among nursing students [2][3] . However, we still know little about the research misconduct situation among nurses. Previous attempts also hardly reflected participants' actual knowledge level of research misconduct. Some studies just asked participants if they knew about relevant research miscon- duct knowledge [4][5] . Therefore, we designed a questionnaire according to two official materials [6][7] to measure the knowledge level of research misconduct among nurses. Between March 2018 and March 2021, a total of 4,112 nurses participated in our study. All the data was collected through online questionnaires. We designed in the online questionnaire that incomplete questionnaires cannot be submitted, so there are no missing values in the database. According to our pilot study, we estimated that the questionnaire filling process usually required approximately 10-15 minutes to complete. Therefore, we excluded those questionnaires from filling out time records in the system that were less than 5 minutes long. We also excluded records that responded in straight lines. Finally, data from 3,640 participants were used for data analysis.
As shown in Table 1 , the average age of the participants was 38.27 ± 7.85, and their average years of career was 16.51 ± 9.12. The majority of them were female (96.6%), married (84.0%), and had children (79.8%). More than 80% of the participants had a Bachelor's degree or above. Two-thirds (67.0%) of participants were in formal employment. Nearly 70% of the participants (69.3%) were entitled to be a nurse-in-charge. Most of the participants (91%) came from Grade A tertiary hospitals. Three quarters of them reported they were in a clinical position.
The average score of research misconduct knowledge among the participants was 15.99 ± 5.79 (range 0 to 30). The descriptive analyses of research activities, perceived reasons for re-  search misconduct, and perceived consequences for research misconduct are shown in Tables 2 -Table 4 , respectively. Of the 11 listed research activities, the top three with the highest percentages were "had patents", "had participated in research projects as other roles", and "was a PI for a research project" ( Table 2 ). Approximately one-third (34.5%) of the participants reported that they had published academic papers as the first author or corresponding author. However, only 3.5% of the participants had published SCIE-indexed papers as the first author or corresponding author. The average research activity index of the participants was 3.04 ± 1.62. As shown in Table 3 , the proportions of all seven optional reasons were high (six of the seven were above 60%). The top three perceived reasons were "nurses deviate in personal value and lack of academic ethics" (78.8%), "there is a lack of academic supervision" (72.6%), and "there exist defects of academic quantitative evaluation" (69.5%).
Overall, the percentages of "very strong influence" for all 11 listed perceived consequences were high (all were greater than 55%, Table 4 ). The average total score of perceived consequences for research misconduct was 48.80 ± 8.08.

Experimental Design, Materials and Methods
We applied the cross-sectional descriptive design. This study was approved by the Peking University Biomedical Ethics Committee (IRB0 0 0 01052-18013). The inclusion criteria were as follows: (1) worked in a tertiary hospital; (2) had certification as a registered nurse; (3) informed consent to participate. Participants were excluded if they (1) could not participate in the study because of severe physical or mental diseases; (2) had more than three months of vacation in the past year; (3) worked in a position that was completely unrelated to nursing.
The questionnaire had five parts, including demographic characteristics, research activities, scientific misconduct knowledge, perceived reasons for research misconduct, and perceived consequences for research misconduct. As shown in Appendix I, demographic variables in the ques- tionnaire included age, gender, marital status, years of career, fertility status, educational attainment, employment situation, title, institution level, department, and position. The scientific misconduct knowledge questionnaire included six multiple-choice questions, which were designed according to a book published by the Research Integrity Construction Office of the Ministry of Science and Technology [6] and an official document released by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China [7] . The knowledge questionnaire was designed mainly according to the chapter order of the book, which was similar to the common process of conducting research. Of the six questions, four were assessed perceived research misconduct during the process of writing research proposals, research project application, conducting research, and publishing papers, relatively; one was about authorship; one was about research ethics. We encoded each option (did not choose = "0", choose = "1") for the multiplechoice questions. The detailed scoring rules for each question are presented in the form of notes in Appendix I. For instance, the first question of the knowledge questionnaire has five options (A, B, C, D, and E), of which A and B are wrong answers. If you choose one of the wrong answers, then score "0". Otherwise, one correct answer add one point. The total score of the knowledge questionnaire ranges from 0 to 30. Higher scores indicate higher knowledge levels.
A total of 11 yes-no questions were used to assess participants' research activities, including publishing academic papers as the first author or corresponding author; publishing SCIE-indexed papers as the first author or corresponding author; publishing books as an editor-in-chief, etc. We also added up participation in 11 research activities as the research activity index to assess participants' diversity and expertise of research.
The assessment tools of perceived reasons for research misconduct and perceived consequences for research misconduct have been applied in our previous study among graduate nursing students [8] . Perceived reasons were assessed by a multiple choice question with seven options. These designed perceived reasons for research misconduct options included "nurses are deviated in personal value and lack of academic ethics", "nurses are lack of research ability", "there is a lack of research integrity training", etc. Perceived consequences were evaluated via an 11-item checklist, with a total score ranges from 11 to 55. Higher scores indicate more severe perceived consequences for research misconduct.
The data was downloaded from the online questionnaire system. We used SPSS 24.0 for data analysis. Descriptive analysis was conducted via mean and standard deviation (S.D.) for continuous variables, and frequency and percentages for categorized variables.

Ethics Statements
Informed consent was collected from all the participants, and the research was carried out in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. This study was approved by the Peking University Biomedical Ethics Committee (IRB0 0 0 01052-18013).

Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Data Availability
Dataset of research misconduct knowledge and associated factors among nurse in China: A national cross-sectional survey (Original data) (Mendeley Data).