Quality through integrity
Acting with integrity in the research environment isn’t always easy. This course will help. It’s a concise and engaging introduction to the principles and practices of research integrity.
By framing the principles of integrity through the broader lens of research quality, this course invites learners to consider that these topics deserve their serious and scholarly attention.
Make it your own
Research integrity is a global concern, but this course is designed to be customised to your specific context.
We can change almost any aspect of this course to suit your institution. Need to add your own policies? Of course! Want to add your own links, resources, and videos? No problem. We have a simple process to make these changes for you.
We also have specific versions for some regions, including an Australian version based on Australian code for the responsible conduct of research and a UK version that articulates the principles of the UK Concordat to Support Research Integrity and the UKRIO Code of Practice for Research.
We can customise this course to suit any region, and to suit the policies, strategies, and preferences of your own institution.
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The quality of research fundamentally relies on trust, transparency, accountability, and rigour. Moreover, a culture that produces great research depends on fairness, acknowledgement, and credit. So, this is a course that seeks to put those principles to practice. It's a course to promote quality through integrity.
Because this course is based on the contemporary research literature, it is suitable for both research students and senior academics. While basic responsibilities are described clearly and simply, many of the broader contextual issues are deep and complex. Experienced researchers will disagree about questions of integrity and quality, and that’s ok, isn’t it? This is a course for those who want real integrity, beyond mere compliance.
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In addition to various activities and 'learning checks' throughout the course, the training concludes with a short quiz. Participants are asked 10 multiple-choice questions at random from a broader pool. The quiz is designed to test application of practical integrity issues.
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If your institution has a Learning Management System (a place that records online training for staff and students), this course will almost certainly work for you.
Using your own systems will keep your learner data private and secure, and provide consistency with your other courses.
The course runs on desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile, etc.
You can test before you commit.
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Chapters of this course include:
• Introduction
• Quality? Integrity?
• Authorship & credit
• Data management & reproducibility
• Peer review
• Conflicts of interest
• Recognition (Australian version only)
• Our research culture
• What if you suspect a breach?
• Quiz
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Currently, we have two specially customised versions of the course:
The UK version is designed to help institutions promote the principles and commitments of the UK Concordat to Support Research Integrity.
The Australian version is designed to help promote the responsibilities of the Australian code for the responsible conduct of research (2018) and its associated guides.
We can make custom versions to suit other locations. Let’s discuss!
Essential training
Our research culture desperately needs more effective training in research integrity. Looking at cases of fabrication and falsification, it's natural for many of us to think, "I would never do that." Some say that research misconduct is only committed by "a few bad apples". But the data do not support that view.
Bad apples?
A systematic review and meta-analysis by Fanelli in 2009 found that 1.97% of scientists admitted to misconduct with respect to research data. However, a 2022 survey by Gopalakrishna et al. of researchers in the Netherlands found that one in twelve admitted to having fabricated or falsified research at least once in the past three years.
This course delivers clear and effective training to help safeguard your research culture.
Make responsibilities clear
Providing consistent training to researchers and research students can help avoid common issues such as authorship disputes by providing clear guidance and helpful advice.
Value researchers’ time
This course is concise. The core content takes researchers less than an hour to complete, although participants can complete the course at their own pace, and come back to it later.
There are many optional resources to explore topics in more detail, and researchers can dip in and out, as they please.
Improve your research culture
Changing a research culture is obviously much harder than implementing a single online course. So, our course uniquely comes with a series of printable discussion primers that provide a practical mechanism that directly connects the online course with a broader institutional strategy to promote research quality and integrity.
Too often important issues of research integrity are made to appear boring through over-administration and the language of 'compliance'. This course has a view of integrity that's deeper, more scholarly, and more fun.
Foster scholarly discussion and peer-to-peer learning
Each primer is a 1-page infographic agenda for a literature-driven workshop. Researchers can access and print them via the online course, but you choose how best to put them to use at your institution.
You may like to leave it to individual research groups and supervisors to discuss as they wish. Or perhaps you’d like to collaborate with integrity ‘champions’ at your institution and use these primers as a basis to promote workshops that expand on the core course materials.
Multidisciplinary approach
Examples are drawn from a broad variety of fields, from the humanities to the hard sciences.
Participants are invited to consider disciplinary differences and how these might affect transdisciplinary research collaborations.
Think, engage
Participants are asked to think and apply.
Could you spot image manipulation in a scientific paper?
Do we engage in any questionable research practices such as cherry picking, data dredging, or hypothesising after the results are known?
How do we promote openness, transparency and reproducibility?
Assess learning
The course includes ‘knowledge checks’ along the way, and then concludes with a short quiz, which is a condition of course completion.
Participants are asked 10 multiple-choice questions at random from a broader pool. The quiz is designed to test application of practical research integrity issues.
Let’s discuss!
We offer this course to research institutions under a non-exclusive, non-transferable license, usually for a period of two years. A license grants unlimited use by staff and students for the license period, and includes customisations. Our prices are very competitive.
We’d love to discuss how this course could be specially customised to suit your needs.