Good Practice Support

Research Integrity Training Programme

Research integrity training is mandatory for all researchers at the CRUK Scotland Institute, from PhD students to Research Group Leaders, and forms part of the induction process for all new researchers, including technicians.

Training is delivered as face-to-face workshops and seminars by the Head of Research Integrity and scientists with relevant research experience. The training programme includes an induction module to establish good research practices and modules on integrity in scientific communication & writing, integrity in managing research data, responsible image processing and responsible use of statistics in experimental design and data analysis.

As well as outlining our policies and expectations the programme raises awareness of reproducible and responsible research practices, encourages behaviour change and offers opportunities to discuss important issues and new initiatives underpinning research integrity, and provides an opportunity to reflect on good research practises within specific fields. It also serves to highlight support and guidance available at the CRUK Scotland Institute. Our training is bespoke and covers generic issues, but course content is specific to the local environment and the research being conducted. It is regularly revised to cover the changing landscape and pertinent issues in the integrity of biomedical research.

Our PhD students have additional annual research integrity workshops to provide opportunities for reflection and have discussions on research culture and research integrity and an additional module on preparing theses with integrity.

Good research practice training continues informally within research groups and guidance on experimental design, data acquisition, processing and analysis is also captured in the training researchers receive from the CRUK Scotland Institute’s Advanced Technology facilities’ staff.

Publishing practice guidance

We monitor the editorial policies of journals to ensure that we adhere to reporting standards on authorship, conflicts of interest, acknowledgement of funding, ethics, field standards, use of generative AI, data presentation, statistical analysis, and open research practices such as data, code and material sharing, We encourage researchers to use the CRediT taxonomy to define authors’ precise contributions and ensure appropriate credit is given and that authors are accountable for their data, as well as acknowledging other contributions to published work.

To promote transparency and reproducibility in our papers, we encourage the publication of protocols, appropriate and responsible data presentation, such as the use of SuperPlots, and clear and precise descriptions of data and metadata, in compliance with FAIR standards.
The CRUK Scotland Institute is fully committed to open access publishing and as such our papers are published under the CC BY 4.0 Attribution 4.0 International licence and are archived at Europe PubMed Central to maximise readership and use. We have a mandatory process for archiving data associated with all publications, we also deposit large data sets in repositories and have a system to track these data. We promote the sharing of all other data, code and materials.

Pre-submission manuscript review

A valuable part of our Research Integrity Service is the CRUK Scotland Institute’s Manuscript Pre-submission Review Process. All our manuscripts are reviewed by the Head of Research Integrity prior to journal submission or posting on pre-print servers and are checked for text plagiarism using iThenticate and for image anomalies using Imagetwin. Our pre-submission manuscript review consists of:

• Checking the CRUK Scotland Institute’s Publishing Standards questionnaire
• Checking the manuscript’s article and author metadata
• Reading and reviewing the manuscript’s abstract, introduction, methods, results and figure legends
• Cross-checking the manuscript’s results text with the figure panels and figure legends
• Checking the manuscript’s figures by eye for presentation and representation of data, duplications and anomalies
• Reporting back to authors to advise on manuscript accuracy and clarity, field and publishers’ reporting standards, open research practices, including open and FAIR data management, and reporting transparency
  and any anomalies identified
• Discussion and final review of recommendations