Collecting and characterizing existing and freely accessible research integrity educational resources

ABSTRACT

In addition to effective training practices, well-structured educational resources are important for developing successful research integrity training programs. A considerable amount of educational material has been developed in the last years, but there is a necessity to find better ways to assess and categorize the already existing resources. We collected 237 freely available online RI educational resources with the aim to describe them in as much detail as possible using a set of well-defined criteria. We developed a grid that gives a full description, based on our 21 criteria, for each collected resource. Mainly videos and online RI training are present in our collection. Worldwide, resources are mainly from the US, whereas in Europe mainly from the UK. In the majority of the cases, the educational resources are not customized, presenting the big three (falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism) as the most addressed topics. Making RI educational resources easily accessible might help to increase awareness about the topic. Moreover, the characterization we provide might help researchers and students to deal with daily RI-related issues, to look for the right tool at the right time, and might help institutions and trainers to develop new trainings without the need to develop new tools.

Abbreviations: CITI: Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative; COPE: Committee on Publication Ethics; ENERI: European Network of Research Ethics and Research Integrity; ENRIO: the European Network of Research Integrity Offices; EU: European Union; NIH: National Institutes of Health; NSF: National Science Foundation; NRIN: the Netherlands Research Integrity Network; ORI: the Office of Research Integrity; PPT: powerpoint; QRP: questionable research practice; RI: research integrity; RCR: responsible conduct of research

KEYWORDS:

• RI educational resources
• research integrity
• freely available resources
• RI training material
• RCR educational resources

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the EC funded project VIRT²UE (grant agreement N.787580) Moreover, we would like to thank Andrew Barnhart for editing the manuscript.

Authors’ contributions

D.P. and K.D. conceived and designed the study. D.P. collected and analysed the educational resources with the contribution of S.A.. D.P. wrote the first drafts of the manuscript with the contribution and the supervision of K.D.. All authors approved the manuscript for submission.

Availability of data and materials

Additional file 1 – RI educational resources characterization grid

The additional file contains a full description, based on our characterization criteria, of each of the 237 resources we collected for this study.

Disclosure statement

DP and KD are amongst the founders of the platform “The Embassy of Good Science”. The platform is an initiative by the two projects EnTIRE and VIRT²UE and founded by European Union’s Horizon 2020 research program under grant agreement N 741782 and 787580.

Additional information

Funding

This research is part of the VIRT2UE project. The project was funded by Horizon 2020, grant agreement No. 787580.