Authors: Rea Ščepanović, Andrea Reyes Elizondo, Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, Ivan Buljan, Ana Marušić, on behalf of the SOPs4RI consortium
Research integrity (RI) refers to performing research adhering to high professional, moral and ethical standards (ALLEA 2017). Research organizations implement different actions to promote RI and responsible conduct of research, and avoid research misconduct. These actions vary from the development and implementation of different guidance documents, providing educational courses, and having mechanisms to deal with allegations of research misconduct. As RI evolves continually, fostering RI is now seen not as a sole responsibility of research performing organizations but rather as a joint effort of different stakeholders involved in research, including researchers and their organizations, research funding organizations, scientific publishers, and journals (Bouter 2018). Different factors may be positively related to the effective implementation of RI at different levels – individual researchers, organization, and research system. These may include individuals having high moral values, nurturing open communication and good ethical climate in the organization, or putting incentives in place for those who perform research following RI principles. However, many negative factors may hinder the implementation of RI, such as lack of RI policies in organizations, different trends in the research culture, like pressure to publish more research or obtain financial resources to conduct research and advance in career. This study aimed to explore the available knowledge on different factors that may positively or negatively impact RI promotion and implementation of RI practices. We employed a scoping review methodology (Peters et al. 2015) to map different RI implementation factors on different levels – individual researchers, research performing and research funding organizations, and system of science. We developed a search strategy and searched bibliographic databases (Web of Science, Scopus, Medline, PsycINFO), which retrieved 33,396 documents for the analysis. Also, we searched the grey literature sources, including Open Grey, World Conferences on RI, CORDIS projects’ database, and publications of National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine) and found 11 additional documents. After the screening of titles and abstracts, 151 documents were included in the synthesis. The analysis of documents obtained through literature search included identifying factors based on their relatedness to different disciplinary fields, different levels of implementation of RI, positive or negative impact, and interventions described in the documents. The documents were mostly related to biomedical sciences (n=74), research performing organizations (n=127), as well as to addressing factors that have a negative impact on RI implementation (n=95). The search will be updated to obtain additional, newer documents related to our study aim. The evidence on RI interventions will be synthesized with regard to effectiveness and knowledge gaps in the successful promotion of RI will be identified.
