Search

Successful research environment requires joint effort by individual researchers, research groups and the organization. This chapter describes the basic principles and good research practices in the context of the research environment and serves as a guide to good, responsible research for research newcomers – researchers at the beginning of their scientific career. In this chapter we will help you navigate the organizational pathway to doing good research. The first step to understanding your rights, obligations and responsibilities in research is knowing that they exist. This chapter offers an introductory level orientation to codes, rules and regulations but also serves as a guide on how to identify whether your organization goes above and beyond offering guidance and assistance regarding research integrity or whether it provides a bare minimum or even nothing at all, and who/what you can turn to in the latter case. Furthermore, this chapter also describes the responsibilities that you as a researcher have towards the organisation regarding the importance of maintaining research integrity, so that you are aware of your accountability and the possible consequences if you disregard organizational responsibility for responsible research.

Organizational climate and culture may influence different work-related outcomes, including responsible conduct of research and research misconduct in academic or research organizations. In this scoping review we collected evidence on outcomes of interventions to change organizational climate or culture in academic or research settings. Out of 32,093 documents retrieved by the search, we analysed 207 documents in full text, out of which 7 met the eligibility criteria and were included in the final analysis. The included studies measured organizational climate (2 studies), organizational culture (4 studies), or both (1 study) at biomedical faculties (4 studies) or non-academic university departments (3 studies). Four studies had post-test, and three before-and-after study designs. The majority of interventions were face-to-face activities (meetings, different teambuilding activities), and two were based on organizational change. Six studies reported positive changes in organizational climate/culture after the intervention. These positive changes were measured as improvements in score on different questionnaire survey or were described through authors' or external evaluator's narrative reports. However, the methodological quality of the studies was low, both for qualitative and quantitative study designs. Replicable studies, using rigorous methods and clearly defined outcomes are urgently needed if organizations want to achieve a real change in organizational climate or culture for responsible research. The protocol for this scoping review was registered at https://osf.io/7zjqb .

Assessing the success and performance of researchers is a difficult task, as their grant output is influenced by a series of factors, including seniority, gender and geographical location of their host institution. In order to assess the effects of these factors, we analysed the publication and citation outputs, using Scopus and Web of Science, and the collaboration networks of European Research Council (ERC) starting (junior) and advanced (senior) grantees. For this study, we used a cohort of 355 grantees from the Life Sciences domain of years 2007-09. While senior grantees had overall greater publication output, junior grantees had a significantly greater pre-post grant award increase in their overall number of publications and in those on which they had last authorship. The collaboration networks size and the number of sub-communities increased for all grantees, although more pronounced for juniors, as they departed from smaller and more compact pre-award co- authorship networks. Both junior and senior grantees increased the size of the community within which they were collaborating in the post-award period. Pre-post grant award performance of grantees was not related to gender, although male junior grantees had more publications than female grantees before and after the grant award. Junior grantees located in lower research-performing countries published less and had less diverse collaboration networks than their peers located in higher research-performing countries. Our study suggests that research environment has greater influence on post-grant award publications than gender especially for junior grantees. Also, collaboration networks may be a useful complement to publication and citation outputs for assessing post-grant research performance, especially for grantees who already have a high publication output and who get highly competitive grants such as those from ERC.

The aim of our study has been to use a qualitative approach to explore the potential motivations and drivers for unethical behaviors in biomedicine and determine the role of institutions regarding those issues in a small scientific community setting. Three focus groups were held---two with doctoral students and one with active senior researchers. Purposive sampling was used to reach participants at different stages of their scientific careers. Participants in all three focus groups were asked the same questions regarding the characteristics and behaviors of ethical/unethical scientists, ethical climate, role, and responsibility of institutions ; they were also asked to suggest ways to improve research integrity. The data analysis included coding of the transcripts, categorization of the initial codes, and identification of themes and patterns. Three main topics were derived from the focus groups discussions. The first included different forms of unethical behaviors including increasing research “waste, ” non- publication of negative results, authorship manipulation, data manipulation, and repression of collaborators. The second addressed the factors influencing unethical behavior, both external and internal, to the researchers. Two different definitions of ethics in science emerged ; one from the categorical perspective and the other from the dimensional perspective. The third topic involved possible routes for improvement, one from within the institution through the research integrity education, research integrity bodies, and quality control, and the other from outside the institution through external supervision of institutions. Based on the results of our study, research misconduct in a small scientific community is perceived to be the consequence of the interaction of several social and psychological factors, both general and specific, for small research communities. Possible improvements should be systematic, aiming both for improvements in work environment and personal awareness in research ethics, and the implementation of those changes should be institutional responsibility.

Objective. This study aimed at synthesizing funding opportunities in the field of family medicine by determining the number of family medicine projects, as well as number of project leaderships and/or participations by each country. This was done in order to encourage inclusion of physicians in countries with underdeveloped research networks in successful research networks or to encourage them to form new ones. Methods. We searched the Community Research and Development Information Service project database in February 2013. Study covered the period from years 1992 – 2012, selecting the projects within the field of general/family medicine. The search was conducted in February 2013. Results. First search conducted in the CORDIS database came up with a total of 466 projects. After excluding 241 projects with insufficient data, we analyzed 225 remaining projects; out of those, 22 (9.8%) were in the field of family medicine and 203 (90.2%) were from other fields of medicine. Sorted by the number of projects per country, Dutch institutions had the highest involvement in family medicine projects and were partners or coordinators in 18 out of 22 selected projects (81.8%), followed by British institutions with 15 (68.8%), and Spanish with 10 projects (45.5%). Croatia was a partner in a single FP7 Health project. Conclusion. Research projects in family medicine funded by the European Union show significant differences between countries. Constant and high-quality international cooperation in family medicine is the prerequisite for improvement and development of scientific research and the profession.