The sugger strikes back!

An update on the 'first annual International Survey of Research Centres and Institutes'

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Keith S. Taber (masquerading as a learned academic)

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if he wanted me to admit I had been wrong, Hussain could direct me to the released survey results and assure me that the data collected for the survey was not being used for other purposes. That is, he should given me grounds to think the survey was a genuine piece of research and not 'sugging'

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Some months ago I published an article in this blog about a message I received from an organisation called Acaudio, that has a website where academics can post audio recordings promoting their research, that invited me to participate in "the first annual International Survey of Research Centres and Institutes". I was suspicious of this invitation for a number of reason as I discuss at 'The first annual International Survey of Gullible Research Centres and Institutes')

Several things suggested to me that this was not a genuine piece of academic research, including the commitment that "We will release the results over the next month" which seemed so unrealistic as to have been written either by someone with no experience of collecting and analysing large scale survey data – or someone with no intention of actually following through on the claim.

Sugging?

Having taken a look at the survey questions, I felt pretty sure thus was an example of what has been labelled as 'sugging'. Sugging is a widely recognised, and indeed widely adopted, unethical practice of collecting marketing information by framing it as a survey. The Market Research Society explains that,

Sugging is a market research industry term, meaning 'selling under the guise of research'. Sugging occurs when individuals or companies pretend to be market researchers conducting a research, when in reality they are trying to build databases, generate sales leads or directly sell product or services….

The practices of sugging and frugging [fundraising under the guise of market research] bring discredit on the profession of research… and mislead members of the public when they are being asked for their co-operation…

Failing to clearly specify the purpose for which the data is being collected is also a breach of…the first principle of the Data Protection Act 1998.

https://www.mrs.org.uk/standards/suggingfaq

Although I thought the chances of the results of the first annual International Survey of Research Centres and Institutes actually being released within the month, or even within a few months to allow for a modest level of over-promising, were pretty minuscule, I did think I should wait a few months and then do a search to see if such a report had appeared. I did not think I was likely to find such a report released into the public domain, but any scientist has to be open-minded enough to consider they might be wrong – and certainly in my own case I've collected enough empirical evidence over the years to know I am not just, in principle, fallible.

Acaudio doth protest too much, methink

But (being fallible) I'd rather forgotten about this and had not got round to doing a web search. Until, that is, I was prompted to do so by receiving an email from the company founder, Hussain Ayed, who had had his attention drawn to my blog, and was – understandably perhaps – not happy about my criticisms:

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Hussain's letter did not address my specific points from the blog (as he did not want to "get into the nitty gritty of it all"), but assured me his company was genuinely trying to do useful work, and there was no scamming.

Of course, I had not suggested Acaudio, the organisation, was itself a 'scam': in my earlier article I had pointed that Acaudio was offering a free, open-access, service which was likely to be useful to academics – and even briefly pointed out some positive features of their website.

But Acaudio's 'survey' was a different matter. It did not meet the basic requirements for a serious academic study, and it asked questions that seemed to be clearly designed as linked to potential selling points for a company that was offering services to increase research impact (so, perhaps, Acaudio).

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And it promised a fantastic time-scale. Perhaps a very large organisation, with staff fully dedicated to analysis and reporting could have released international survey results within a month of collecting data – perhaps? But Acaudio was a company with one company officer that reported employing one person.

Given the scale of the organisation, what Acaudio have achieved with their website in a relatively short time is highly impressive. But…

…where is that survey report?

I replied to Hussain, as below.

Dear Hussain Ayed

Thank you for your message.

I have not written "a comprehensive attack on [your] company" and do not have a sufficient knowledge-base to have done so. I have indeed, however, published a blog article criticising your marketing techniques based on the direct evidence in messages you have sent me. In particular, I claimed that,

(i) (despite being registered as a UK based company) you did not adhere to the UK regulations concerning direct marketing. (I assume you are not seeking to challenge this given the evidence of your own emails)

(ii) that you were also 'sugging': undertaking marketing under the guise of carrying out a survey.

If I understand your complaint, you are suggesting in regard to point (ii) that you really were carrying out a survey for the public good (rather than to collect information for your own commercial purposes) and that any apparent failure of rigour in this regard actually resulted from a lack of relevant expertise within the company. If so, perhaps you will send me, or tell me where I can access, the published outcome of the survey (due to be available by the middle of June 2023 according to your earlier message). I have looked on line for this, but a Google search (using the term "International Survey of Research Centres and Institutes") failed to locate the report.

Can you offer me an assurance that information collected for the survey was ONLY used for the analysis that led to the published survey report (assuming there is one you can point me to), and that this information was not retained by your organisation as a basis for contacting individuals with regard to your company's services? If you can offer appropriate assurances then I will be happy to add an inserted edit into the blog to include a statement along the lines that the company assures me that all information collected was only used for the purposes of producing a survey report, and was not retained or used in any other way by the company.

So, to summarise regarding point (ii), if this survey was not a scam, please (a) point me to the outcomes, and (b) give me these assurances about not collecting information under false premises.

You also have the right to reply directly. If you really think anything in my article amounted to "misleading bits of 'evidence' " then please do correct this. You are free to submit a response in the comments section at the bottom of the page. If you wish to do that, I will be happy to publish your reply (subject to my usual restrictions which I am sure should not be any impediment to you – so, I will not publish anything I think might be libellous of a third party, nor anything with obscenity/profanity etc. Sadly, I do sometimes have to reject comments of these kinds.)

I recognise that comments have less prominence than the blog article they follow, and that indeed some readers may not get that far in their engagement with an article. Therefore, if you do submit a reply I am happy to also add a statement at the HEAD of my article to point out out to readers that there is a reply on behalf of the company beneath the article, so my readers see that notice BEFORE proceeding to read my own account. I am not looking for people/organisations to criticise for the sake of it, but have become concerned about the extent of unethical practice in the name of academic work (such as the marketing of predatory journals and conferences) and do point out some of the examples that come my way. I believe such bad practice is very damaging, and especially so for students who are new to the academic world, and for those working working in under-resourced contexts who may be under extreme pressure to achieve 'tenure'. People spend their limited funds on getting published in journals that have no serious peer review (and so are not taken seriously by most academics), or presenting at conferences which 'invite' contributions from anyone prepared to pay the fees. I do not spend time looking for such bad practice: it arrives in my inbox on a fairly frequent basis.

Perhaps your intentions are indeed honourable, and perhaps you are doing good work. Perhaps you are indeed "working to tackle inequality in higher education and academia", which obviously would be valuable, although I am not sure how this is achieved by working with groups at Cambridge such as the Bioelectronic Systems Tech Group – unless you perhaps charge fees to those in wealthy institutions to allow you to offer a free service for those elsewhere? If you do: good on you. Even so, I would strongly suggest you 'clean up your act' as far as your marketing is concerned, and make sure your email campaigns are within the law. By failing to follow the regulations you present your organisation as either being unprofessional (giving the impression no one knows what they are doing) or dodgy (if you* know the regulations, but are choosing not to follow them). *I assume you are responsible for the marketing strategy, but even if someone else is doing this for you, I suspect you (as the only registered company officer) would be considered ultimately responsible for not following the regulations.

If you are genuine about wishing to learn more about undertaking quality surveys, there are many sources of information. My pages on research methods might be a place to get some introductory background, but if this to be a major part of your company's activity I would really suggest you should employ someone with expertise, or retain a consultant who works in that area.

Thank you for the offer to work with you, but I am retired and have too many existing projects to work on – and in any case you should work with someone you genuinely respect, not someone that you consider only to "masquerade as a learned academic" and who has "shaky morals".

Best wishes

Keith

My key point was that if he wanted me to admit I had been wrong, Hussain could direct me to the released survey results and assure me that the data collected for the survey was not being used for other purposes. That is, he should given me grounds to think the survey was a genuine piece of research and not 'sugging'.

The findings of the survey are 'reserved'

Later that day, I got the following reply:

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So, it seems the research report that was supposed to have been released ("over the next month" – according to Acaudio's email dated 15th May 2023) was not available, and – furthermore – would not be made available to me.

• A key principle of scientific research is that the outcomes are published – that is made available to the public: and not "reserved" for certain people the researchers select!
• A key feature of ethical research is that a commitment is made to make outcomes available (as Acaudio did) and this is followed through (as Acaudio did not).

What is the research data being used for?

Hussain also failed to offer any assurances that the data collected under the claim (pretence, surely) of carrying out survey research was not being used for commercial purposes – as a basis for evaluating the potential merits of approaching different respondents to tender for services. I cannot prove that Acaudio was using the collected information for such purposes, but if my suspicions were misplaced (and if Hussain really wanted to persuade me that the survey was not intended as a scam) it would have been very easy to simply include a sentence in his response to that effect – to have assured me that the research data was being analysed anonymously and handled separately from the company's marketing data with a suitable 'ethical wall' between.¹

That is, Hussain could have simply got into enough of the "nitty gritty" to have offered an assurance of following an ethical protocol, instead of choosing to insult me…as I pointed out to him:-

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Dear Hussain

Thank you for your message.

So, the 'survey' results (if indeed any such document actually exists) that you indicated to me would be released by mid-June are still not actually available in the public domain. As you say: 'Hmm'.

You are right, that I would have no right to ask you to provide me with anything – except that YOU ASKED ME to believe I misjudged you, and to withdraw my public criticisms; and so I ASKED YOU to provide the evidence to persuade me by (i) proving there was a survey analysis with published results, and (ii) giving an assurance that you did not use, for your company's marketing purposes, data supposedly collected for publishable research. There is of course no reason why you should have provided either the results or the assurances, unless you actually did feel I had judged Acaudio too harshly and you wanted to give me reason to acknowledge this. The only thing that might give me "some sort of power over [you]" in this regard is your suggestion to me that I might wish to "take back the claims that [I] made". Can I remind you: you contacted me. You contacted me, unsolicited, in December 2022, and then again in May 2023. This morning, you contacted me again specifically to suggest my suggestions of wrong-doing were misjudged. But you will not back that up, so you have simply reinforced my earlier inferences.

For some reason that is not clear to me, you think that my mind is on money – that is presumably why I spend some of my valuable time highlighting poor academic practices on a personal website that brings in no income and is financed from my personal funds. Perhaps that is the company director finding it hard to get inside the mind of a retired teacher who worked his entire career in the public sector? (That is not meant as an insult – I probably have the reverse difficulty in understanding the motivations of the commercial mind. Perhaps that is why these are "things that are beyond [my] understanding"?) I do not have any problem with you setting up a company to make money (good luck to you if you work hard and treat people with due respect), and think it is perfectly possible for an organisation to both make money and produce public goods – I am not against commercial organisations per se. My 'vested interests' relate to commitments to certain values that I think underpin both good science and academic activities more broadly. A key one is honesty (which is one fundamental aspect of treating people with due respect). We are all entitled (perhaps even have a duty?) to make the strongest arguments for our positions, but when people knowingly misrepresent (e.g., "We will release the results over the next month" but no publication is forthcoming) in order to to advance their interests, this undermines the scholarly community. Anyone can be wrong. Anyone can be mistaken. Anyone can fail in a venture. (Such as promising a report, genuinely intending to produce one, but finding the task was more complex than anticipated. Had that been your response, I might have found this feasible. Instead, you promised to release the results, but now you claim you have "every right to ignore [my] request for the outcomes". Yes, that is so – if the commitment you made means nothing.) As long as we can trust each other to be open and honest the system will eventually self-correct in cases when there are false (but honestly motivated) claims. Yet, these days, academics are flooded with offers and claims that are not mistaken, but deliberately misleading. That is what I find so troublesome that I take time to call out examples. That may seem strange to you, but you have to remember I have worked as a school, college, and university, teacher all my working life, so I identify at a very deep level with the basic values underpinning the quest for knowledge and learning. When I get an email from someone claiming they are doing a survey, but which seems to be an attempt to market services, I do take it personally. I do not like to be lied to. I do not like to be treated as a fool. And I do not like the thought that perhaps less experienced colleagues and graduate students may take such approaches at face value and not appreciate they are being scammed. Can does not equate to should: you may have "the ability to write and say what [you] want", but that does not mean you have the right to deliberately mislead people. You say you will not be engaging with me any more. Fine. You started this correspondence with your unsolicited approaches. I will be very happy if you remove me from your marketing list (that I did not sign up for) and do not contact me again. That might be in both our interests.

And despite all this, I wish you well. Whatever your mistakes in the past, if you do genuinely wish to make a difference in the way you suggest, then I hope you are successful. But please, if you believe in your company and the contribution it can make, seek to be totally honest with potential clients. If you are in this for the long term, then developing trust and a strong reputation for ethical business practices will surely create a fund of social capital that will pay dividends as you build up the organisation. Whereas producing emails of the kind you have sent me today is likely to be counter-productive and just alienate people: using ad hominem points – I am masquerading as a learned academic, out of touch, arrogant, unfit and entitled; with shaky morals and vested interests; things are beyond my understanding; I write nonsense – simply suggests you have no substantive points to support your position. By doing this you automatically cede the higher ground. And, moreover, is that really the way you want your company represented in its communications?

Best wishes

Keith 

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As I wrote above, Acaudio seem to be doing a really good job in setting up a platform where researchers can post accounts of their research – and given the scale of the organisation – I assume much (if not all) of that is down to Hussain. That, he can be proud of.

However, using the appearance of an international survey as a cover for collecting data that can be used to market a company's services is widely recognised as a dishonest and unethical (if not illegal ²) practice. I think he should less proud of himself in that regard.

If Hussain still wants to maintain that his request for contributions to the first annual International Survey of Research Centres and Institutes was intended as a genuine attempt at academic research, rather than just a marketing scam, then he still has the option of publishing a report of the study so that the academic community can evaluate the extent to which the survey meets the norms of genuine research; and so that, at very least, he will have met one key criterion of academic research (publication).

This would also show that Acaudio are prepared to meet their side of the contract they offered to potential respondents (i.e., please contribute to this survey – in consideration we will release the results over the next month). Any reputable business should be looking to make good on its promises.

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Notes

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¹ The idea of an ethical wall (sometimes referred to as a 'Chinese wall') is important in businesses where there is the potential for conflicts of interest. Consider, for example, firms of lawyers that may have multiple clients, and where information offered in confidence by one client could have commercial value for another. The firm is expected to have protocols in place so that information about one client is not either leaked to another client, or (deliberately or inadvertently) influences advice given to another client. To avoid inadvertent influence, it may be necessary to ensure staff working with one client are not involved in work for another client that may be seen to have conflicting interests.

A company may hire a market research organisation to carry out market research to inform then about future strategies – so the people analysing the data have no bias due to preferred outcomes, and no temptation to misuse the data for direct marketing purposes. The commissioned report will not identify particular respondents. Then there is an ethical wall between the market researchers who report on the overall state of the market, and the client company's marketing and sales section.

My reference to the small size of Acaudio is not intended as an inherent criticism. My original point was that such a small company was unlikely to have the capacity to carry out a meaningful international survey (which does not imply the intention to do so was necessarily inauthentic – Acaudio might have simply overstretched itself).

However, a very small company might well have inherent difficulties in carrying out genuine research which did not leak information about specific respondents to those involved in sales.

Many surveys invite people to offer their email if they wish for feedback or to make themselves available for follow-up interviews – but offer an assurance the email address will not be used for other purposes, and need not be given to participate. Acaudio's survey required identifying information.² This is a strong indicator that the primary purpose was not scholarly research.

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² The Data Protection Act 2018 concerns personal information:

"Everyone responsible for using personal data has to follow strict rules called 'data protection principles'. They must make sure the information is:

• used fairly, lawfully and transparently
• used for specified, explicit purposes
• used in a way that is adequate, relevant and limited to only what is necessary
• accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date
• kept for no longer than is necessary
• handled in a way that ensures appropriate security, including protection against unlawful or unauthorised processing, access, loss, destruction or damage"

GOV.UK

Acaudio's survey is nominally about research institutes not individual people.

However, it asks questions such as

• "How satisfied are you with…"
• "How much time do you spend…"
• "Do you feel like…"
• "What are the biggest challenges you face…"
• "Who do you feel is…"
• "How effective do you think…"
• "Do you agree…"
• "What would you consider..."
• "How much would you consider…"
• "Would you be interested in…"
• "How do you decide…"
• "What do you hope…"

This is information about a person, moreover a person of known email address:

" 'personal data' means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person ('data subject'); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier…"

Information Commissioner's Office

So, if information collected by this survey was used for purposes other than the survey itself –

• say perhaps for identifying sales leads {e.g., "How satisfied are you with the level of awareness people have of your centre / institute?" "How effective do you think your current promotion methods are?"; "How important is building an audience for the work of the research centre / institute?"};
• and/or profiling potential clients
  • in terms of level of resource that might be available to buy services {e.g., "How much would you consider to be a reasonable amount to spend on promotional activities?"},
  • or priorities for research impact strategies {e.g., "What mediums [sic] would you consider using to promote your research centre / institute?"; "Do you agree it is important to have a dedicated person to take care of promotional activities?"}

– would that not be a breach of UK data protection law?

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