Accountability in Research-Policies and Quality Assurance最新文献

Background: Nutrition research funded by commercial entities may be subject to bias. To date, no study has examined the prevalence of commercial funding in clinical trials of dietary supplements for weight loss.

Objective: To estimate the prevalence of commercial funding of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of dietary supplement interventions for weight loss.

Methods: We conducted a rapid review of English-language RCTs published between 1 January 2023, testing dietary supplements for weight loss. Funding sources were extracted from full texts and categorized as industry, nonprofit, trade association, academic, government, or other. Commercial funders, trade associations, and nonprofits were further reviewed for ties to supplement sales.

Results: Of 74 articles reviewed, 59% (n = 44) reported commercial funding, involving 64 unique funders and 118 instances of commercial involvement. More than half of funders sold dietary supplements or had affiliated companies that did, though some affiliations could not be verified due to limited transparency. No nonprofit funders had ties to supplement sales.

Conclusions: The majority of RCTs evaluating dietary supplements for weight loss reported commercial funding. Further research is needed to assess whether such funding influences study findings.

Background: Initiatives in responsible conduct of research (RCR) have often been ineffective, since they are based on several problematic assumptions. These include that (1) integrity issues in biomedical research serve as paradigm cases for those in research in general, (2) the primary cause of research misconduct is individual researchers' behavior, (3) educational interventions alone can prevent research misconduct, and (4) RCR can be addressed at the level of institutions. However, the research ecosystem comprises various partners, including funding agencies, research institutions, professional societies, and accreditation bodies.

Methods: This study employs a review of literature and critical reflection to analyze how partners comprising the research ecosystem shape research environments, making policy recommendations on that basis.

Results: Research misconduct should be understood as resulting from misaligned incentives throughout the research ecosystem. Just as institutional cultures shape individuals, the policies of partners comprising the research ecosystem shape institutional cultures. An ecosystems approach to RCR consists in understanding how partners comprising the research ecosystem depend on each other, using these relations to ensure each holds the others accountable to promote the production of valid and reliable research.

Conclusion: Viewing RCR through an ecosystems lens highlights the need for coordinated accountability among research partners.

Background: Many peer review attributes are widely criticized and poorly investigated, particularly in the context of proposals' peer review. This study aims to explore stakeholders' perspectives on the role of (un)blinding and the implications of open peer review for biomedical proposals' peer review.

Methods: We conducted a generic descriptive qualitative study within a constructivist paradigm, using semi-structured interviews. Twenty-three participants were selected through purposive and snowball sampling from funding agencies in Belgium and Qatar. Transcribed interviews were analyzed according to the 6-step thematic framework analysis. During the interviews, participants were asked to rate 7 quantitative statements to supplement the qualitative data.

Results: Codes with shared characteristics were grouped into categories, and ultimately three themes were generated: (1) the importance of increased transparency in fund allocation procedures while maintaining blinded reviewers' identities, (2) open peer review as a feasible approach for enhancing transparency and accountability in proposals' peer review, and (3) a growing critical stance toward traditional peer review systems.

Conclusion: While there remains a strong preference for double-blinded review within the context of our study, its limitations have become evident-particularly given current funding challenges. These shortcomings highlight the need for greater openness in peer review and increased transparency in fund allocation processes.

Weather and climate research is an area of science in which private companies, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have substantial interests at stake, but little is known about how academic journals address these interests. The primary aim of this study was to help address this question by analyzing the content of funding disclosure polices of journals that publish research on weather and climate. We reviewed and analyzed policies from 100 journals that focus on weather and climate research and found that most of them have comprehensive policies for disclosing conflicts of interest (COIs) and funding sources. 98% of the journals require disclosure of COIs; 91.8% require funding disclosure; 87.9% require disclosure of non-financial COIs; 86.9% define COIs, 80.8% provide examples of COIs, and 65.7% policies that apply to reviewers and editors, and 55.6% have enforcement mechanisms for violations of COI policies. Several of the policies were positively associated with a higher journal impact factor. Although most journals that publish research on weather and climate research have comprehensive COI and funding disclosure policies, additional research is needed to determine the extent to authors, reviewers, and editors understand and follow these policies.

The Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) was released in 2014 with the aim of improving the attribution of credit and responsibilities in scholarly publications. Besides encouraging researchers to use CRediT for specification of contributions in publications, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Intramural Research Program (IRP) has been using CRediT as a tool to investigate and resolve authorship disputes pre- and post-publication. In this article, we share the policies and procedures used at the NIH IRP for resolving authorship disputes, with the hope that other administrators and institutions might find value in our approach and provide feedback where necessary. The NIH IRP employs CRediT to offer a more objective and structured approach to understanding how a supervisor, complainant, or other parties involved in a dispute view the overall contributions in a project. This approach provides both the research group and the mediator or investigator with a common vocabulary to describe contributions and minimizes the likelihood of misunderstanding. Developing robust and transparent institutional mechanisms to address and resolve disputes, including guidance on how to address conflicts on authorship and authorship order, might contribute to a more productive and healthier research environment.

Background: This article reports on the prevalence of registration of empirical studies presented at three editions of the World Conference on Research Integrity at the time of abstract submission.

Methods: During registration and abstract submission, applicants were invited to answer questions on registration of the study they presented and their academic background.

Results: Descriptive analyses of the responses regarding a total of 452 abstracts describing empirical studies showed that the prevalence of registration among presenters of empirical research did not increase across the three WCRIs, and was on average 28%. The verifiability of claims of registration did increase over time, however, from 44% to 88% of the abstracts of empirical studies claimed to be registered. Reasons given for not registering varied substantially, but little faith in its usefulness and unfamiliarity were frequently mentioned. Younger researchers tended to register more often than others, and researchers with a biomedical background registered more frequently.

Conclusion: We suggest simplifying the registration process and propose that funding agencies, research institutes, and scholarly journals should demand registration of empirical studies.

Background: The study examines the prevalence of plagiarism in hijacked journals, a category of problematic journals that have proliferated over the past decade.

Methods: A quasi-random sample of 936 papers published in 58 hijacked journals that provided free access to their archive as of June 2021 was selected for the analysis. The study utilizes Urkund (Ouriginal) software and manual verification to investigate plagiarism and finds a significant prevalence of plagiarism in hijacked journals.

Results: Out of the analyzed sample papers, 618 (66%) were found to contain instances of plagiarism, and 28% of papers from the sample (n = 259) displayed text similarities of 25% or more. The analysis reveals that a majority of authors originate from developing and ex-Soviet countries, with limited affiliation ties to developed countries and scarce international cooperation in papers submitted to hijacked journals. The absence of rigorous publication requirements, peer review processes, and plagiarism checks in hijacked journals creates an environment where authors can publish texts with a significant amount of plagiarism.

Conclusions: These findings suggest a tendency for fraudulent journals to attract authors who do not uphold scientific integrity principles. The legitimization of papers from hijacked journals in bibliographic databases, along with their citation, poses significant challenges to scientific integrity.

Research Funding Organizations (RFOs) play an important role in promoting research integrity (RI). Not only do they allocate resources to research institutions and researchers, but they also set and monitor research standards in their funded projects. In spite of their crucial role, there is a paucity of guidance on how RFOs can promote research integrity. As part of the EU-Funded SOPs4RI project, we aimed to address this gap by co-creating guidelines to help RFOs promote RI, engaging a diverse group of stakeholders. Based on a Delphi survey, reviews of evidence and stakeholder interviews, three guideline topics were identified: 1) the selection and evaluation of proposals; 2) monitoring of funded projects; and 3) prevention of unjustified interference. Four sets of co-creation workshops were conducted for each guideline topic, and the input revised and finalized. Understanding these debates could help RFOs from diverse cultural and organizational backgrounds who are developing their own RI guidelines. Therefore, in this paper, we summarize the key results and emphasize the final recommendations. Further, we provide the main points of discussion that occurred during the workshops and explain how they were addressed or resolved in the final guidelines and how they can help in future endeavors to improve funders' practices to foster RI.

Background: This study explored experiences of quantitative researchers who work with marginalized populations.Methods/materials: Participants were recruited from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology forum, and asked questions regarding their struggles and best practices while working with marginalized populations in which they are or are not a member.Results: Responses included concerns regarding bidirectional trust, community norms, perceived bias, diversity and participant recruitment and compensation. We explore the benefits of qualitative understandings of bias (i.e. positionality, reflexivity), salient concerns reported by quantitative researchers, and our recommendations for the ethical inclusion of these practices across quantitative work.Conclusions: This paper contributes to understanding of current struggles and best practices while conducting research among marginalized populations. Additionally, we encourage quantitative researchers to engage in reflexive research practices, particularly for the benefit of marginalized group research. We extend the insider-outsider researcher discussion to quantitative researchers.