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1 Introduction

Research integrity is a rapidly expanding field of research, with the number of articles published in the last decade (2010 to 2022) almost three times greater than in each previous decade [1, 2]. This chapter will describe the latest evidence we have from research on research integrity. It is not a formal and methodologically rigorous scoping review, but a personal perspective from a meta-researcher in the European research landscape. The chapter is also skewed towards biomedical research, as that is the discipline I work in and study.

It is important to first provide the definition of research integrity, as it overlaps with other concepts – research ethics, responsible research and innovation (RRI), an open and responsible science.

From the perspective of the European research framework (ENERI – European Network for Research Ethics and Integrity), research integrity is defined as “the attitude and habit of the researchers to conduct research according to appropriate ethical, legal, and professional frameworks, obligations and standards” [3]. Research ethics is considered to be a wider concept, defined as “the application of ethical principles or values to the various issues and fields of research. This includes ethical aspects of the design and conduct of research, the way human participants or animals within research projects are treated, whether research results may be misused for criminal purposes, and it refers also to aspects of scientific misconduct” [4].

Research ethics (and integrity) is included in the wider concept that aligns research with the society – responsible research and innovation (RRI). This societal concept of research is particularly emphasized in the research frameworks of the European Union, and is often defined as “a transparent, interactive process by which societal actors and innovators become mutually responsive to each other with a view to the (ethical) acceptability, sustainability and societal desirability of the innovation process” [5]. In the 2020–2024 strategy on research and innovation of the European Commission [6], the goal related to the European Union (EU) Open Science Policy includes relevant concepts, such as research integrity and reproducibility of scientific results and citizen science, and the term open and responsible research/science is often used in the grant calls in Horizon Europe.

In addition to the differences in definitions and concepts, the European landscape is also very varied in the approaches to and formal structure of research ethics and research integrity, as demonstrated by our latest study [7], drawing from the Mutual Learning Exercise (MLE) on Research Integrity [8] and the information from the Embassy of Good Science [9]. We created Country Research Integrity Cards, describing the structures, processes and incentives for research integrity in several European countries; they are available at The Embassy of Good Science, a MediaWiki platform research ethics and integrity for the research community. Despite quite large differences in how different European countries legislate and structure research integrity, they are all unified around the core principles outlined in the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity [10]: reliability, honesty, respect and accountability. The Code has become a kind of “soft” law in the EU, because all legal entities participating in the Horizon Europe research framework programme have to confirm that their activities will comply with the Code [11].

According to the Code, research integrity and responsible research is achieved through good research practices related to the 8 main contexts: 1) research environment, 2) training, supervision and mentoring, 3) research procedures, 4) safeguards, 5) data practices and management, 6) collaborative working, 7) publication and dissemination, and 8) reviewing, evaluating and editing. I am going to present most recent evidence, as well as our experience in improving these aspects of research, and point to future challenges in research integrity policies and practices.

2 Research Environment

The evidence has moved from the view of research misconduct as an individual failure (a “rotten apple”) to the responsibility of the institutions and the importance of environment for responsible research (“basket of apples”) [12]. Good research practices in research organizations recommended by the Code include promoting awareness about research integrity and building up research culture. This includes creating research policies and procedures, as well as establishing the process for addressing and investigating allegations of research misconduct. To achieve this, the organizations must have adequate infrastructure and reward open and reproducible research in job promotions or hiring new researchers, particularly early career researchers.

These recommendations are clear and reasonable. However, there is little high-quality evidence about interventions to achieve a research climate that promotes research integrity. We recently performed a coping review of interventions to change organizational climate or culture in academic or research settings [13]. The terms “culture” and “climate” are often used interchangeably, although the differences have been described in literature [13]. Research climate is usually considered to be the shared perception of researchers about research policies, practices and procedures, and research behaviours perceived as rewarding. On the other hand, research culture is a wider and more complex system of most prevalent basic norms, deep principles and shared opinions in research environment. The methodological approaches to measuring research climate and culture also differ – climate is usually measured by questionnaire surveys, whereas culture can be best measured using qualitative study designs.

In our systematic review of more than 32 thousand articles retrieved from five bibliographical databases by specific search strategy and a manual search of a number of grey literature resources (Clinicaltrials.gov, Open Science Framework, Prospero database, Basesearch.net, Google Scholar, Opengrey.org, Campbell Collaboration Library and Science.gov databases), we identified only 7 studies that tested interventions for organizational (not necessarily research) climate or culture. Six of the seven studies reported positive changes after the intervention. These changes were measured by repeated questionnaire surveys or by narrative reports after the intervention. As the methodology in these studies was low, it is not possible at the moment to provide recommendations to institutions. There are many different practices that organizations for performing research and those that fund research have to promote research integrity [14], but also many different factors that influence promotion and implementation of research integrity policies at these organizations [15]. More research and rigorous methodology are needed if we want to understand how interventions work at the institutional level and whether they are effective. A recent set of tools for generating research integrity promotion plans at research performing and research funding organizations, created by the Horizon 2020 project SOPs4RI (Standard Operating Procedures for Research Integrity) [16], may be a good start for testing research integrity interventions in organizations.

It is important to keep in mind that different organizations need different approaches as well as focus on different research integrity issues, especially in relation to the research disciplines involved, as they may have different research integrity standards and practices [17]. Furthermore, it seems that it is difficult to change attitudes, knowledge and behaviours in research integrity. A ten-year follow-up study of doctoral students at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Oslo in Norway showed that, although there is an improvement in their research integrity, the research integrity indicators remained stable over time [18]. It has to be kept in mind that Norway has a well-developed research integrity and research ethics framework at national and organizational levels [7].

3 Training, Supervision and Mentoring

In order to achieve high standards of responsible research, education and training of researchers of all professional levels is mandatory, from early career researchers to senior researchers and managers. Educational activities should include not only ethics and integrity but also research design, methodology and analysis, so that they produce high quality and reproducible research.

Some years ago, we conducted a systematic review using rigorous Cochrane methodology to assess the evidence for interventions to prevent research misconduct and foster research integrity [19]. We looked at 31 studies, including randomized controlled trials as the most rigorous methodological study design and involving more than 9 thousand participants. Like with organizational culture/climate, we do not have good evidence of what works, except for some low-quality evidence that indicates that practical teaching about plagiarism may reduce its occurrence in the student population.

It is thus very difficult to provide recommendations to research organizations about how to organize research integrity training. A recent content analysis of available training materials at 11 research-intensive European universities showed great diversity in the materials among the universities [20]. Recommendations that emerged from this study were that universities have to 1) develop university-wide research integrity training, at least at the level of postgraduate (doctoral) studies; 2) agree on the minimum requirements for the content, format, length and frequency of research integrity education; and 3) share educational material to increase the quality of research in whole Europe and facilitate mobility of researchers. Findings from a large focus study involving 147 participants in 8 European countries [21] support these recommendations. The themes that emerged from this qualitative study included the need for research integrity education to be available to all actors in research, to be tailored to specific needs and to use formal and informal format, and to be paralleled by active motivation of the trainees.

While there is a plethora of educational material for research integrity available online, especially in the USA [22], there was no systematic approach in Europe. In recent years, different approaches to teaching research integrity have been developed by several Horizon 2020 projects, including VIRT2UE, Path2Integrity, and Integrity. They came together in a new initiative, the Network for education in research quality (NERQ), which has the ambition to share good practices in teaching research integrity and generally high-quality research, improve the training of trainers and stimulate the development of new trainings based on evidence [23].

Of particular importance in promoting research integrity is supervision and mentoring, which can impart important values and virtues during professional development of a researcher [24]. In academic medicine, we showed some time ago that, while mentoring is perceived as very important, there is not much evidence on its effectiveness as an intervention tool to help the professional development of the mentees [25]. The scoping review of qualitative studies in academic mentoring in medicine also showed that both the mentor and the mentee had to be engaged in and committed to successful mentoring and the mentoring has to happen in a facilitating organizational environment [26]. The important role of the organization in supporting mentoring and supervision of early career researchers, particularly in relation to research integrity was confirmed in a recent qualitative study of research supervisors and their role of research integrity trainers [27]. More studies are needed to explore what interventions work to promote and facilitate successful mentoring. As senior researchers often do not succeed in transmitting the knowledge, behaviours and virtues necessary for responsible research, there are calls for reverse mentoring, where the early career researchers act as mentors to their senior colleagues. In this way, which has been tested in practice in some fields, it may be possible to more effectively promote and foster research integrity and build a positive climate for responsible research [28].

Mentoring, as a very personal and complex professional relationship between two individuals currently faces not only the problems of evidence for its effectiveness but also important ethical dilemmas in the world of growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in research, including mentoring [29]. It will be interesting to follow future developments in AI-assisted mentoring.

In order to achieve high standards of responsible research, education and training of researchers of all professional levels is mandatory, from early career researchers to senior researchers and managers. Educational activities should include not only ethics and integrity but also research design, methodology and analysis, so that they produce high quality and reproducible research.

4 Research Procedures

When performing research, researchers are expected to base their research on best available evidence; to use the resources to design and execute research, and analyse the results in a responsible way; interpret and publish the results in open and transparent, as well as accurate way so that they can be verified and reproduced.

Responsible approach to research procedures is an ongoing topic of debate and efforts to improve this important, pervasive and complex aspect of research. Many solutions have been offered in recent years but we still need more studies and better evidence to see what works to “increase the value and reduce waste in research design, conduct and analysis” [30].

In recent years, the term “reproducible science” has gained its importance as a point of intervention to increase the quality of research results. It includes different measures to assure the integrity and trustworthiness of important elements of scientific research: use of research methods, reporting and dissemination of results and their reproducibility, as well as evaluation of research and incentives for researchers [31]. Research reproducibility is one of the eight ambitions the EU’s open science policy [6]. Table 1 presents the proposals to increase science reproducibility, with examples of interventions, however without evidence of their effectiveness as yet [31].

Table 1. A manifesto for reproducible science.*
Full size table

As can be seen from Table 1, most of the proposed initiatives had low uptake in 2017, and much has not been changed until the present. Some of the initiatives, such as PubMed Commons feature to promote post-publication peer review have failed, due to a lack of interest [32]. New modalities of reporting and dissemination have been developed, which I will address in the section on publishing.

Even those incentives that are considered to be widely adopted, such as registration of clinical trials, are not proving to be effective. For example, a study of registration status of published clinical trials showed that the prevalence of published trials that were pre-registered increased over time, but still remain very low, with only one in five trials being prospectively registered [33]. We still have a long time and more effort needed to address all aspects of quality research and test interventions to increase it.

5 Safeguards

This good research practice relates to compliance with codes and other professional regulations relevant to the research discipline, including the participation of people in research, or involvement of animals or cultural, biological or environmental research subjects. Research must be done with respect to the benefit of the community and not only of the researchers. Researchers must also plan, execute, analyse and report the results of their research with regard to differences among different populations, including age, gender, culture, personal beliefs, socioeconomic factors and ethnic origin. They must also address and manage not only benefits but also harms stemming from their research.

Based on historical principles and experiences, safeguards in science are often legally determined and well regulated, in order to anticipate and mitigate unintended consequences of scientific research, as defined by Merton already in 1936: ignorance, errors, focusing on immediate benefit instead of long-term consequences, basic values, and self-defeating prophecy [34]. Despite long-existing codes and regulations, the prevalence of research misconduct, either in the form of fraud – falsification, fabrication and plagiarism, or detrimental research practices, which are smaller but very prevalent poor research practices, does not significantly changed over the last decade. A recent meta-analysis of reported practices estimated that about 3% or researchers report committing at least 1 fraudulent practice and about 13% at least one detrimental research practice [35]. About 16% of them have witnessed others committing fraud and 40% witnessed instances of detrimental research practices by others [35].

In the European context, there is a great diversity in available codes and other guidance documents, depending on the country, research discipline and the research development. A recent analysis of national level codes for research integrity [36], showed great divergence among European countries, despite the unifying umbrella of the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity. What is most common are the codes to deal with scientific fraud, i.e. egregious research misconduct. Our analysis of the European landscape for research integrity in 2022 also demonstrated the lack of harmony in national structures, procedures and practices [7]. There is also diversity of how researchers from different European settings perceive research misconduct. A study of researchers from institutions in northern, southern and northwestern Europe had different perceptions of plagiarism practices, with those from more northern countries having a stricter view of what represents plagiarism [37].

All this presents a serious problem with regard to safety of researchers when they move between research organisations in different countries, because of uncertainty in expectations from research integrity codes. There is a lot of work at all levels, from the regulators to the research organizations and researchers to arrive to a common understanding of underlying principles of research integrity. The tools box for creating research integrity promotion plans from the Horizon 2020 project SOPs4RI, as mentioned before, may help the harmonization of codes across Europe [16, 38].

6 Data Practices and Management

Openness of data has become a central principle in science, particularly from the view of public research funders, who want to ensure a maximum use of research output. The FAIR principles of data management and stewardship are implemented in the European Open Science Policy [6]: research data should be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.

It is also expected from the actors in research (researchers and their organizations) to decide on how they will provide or allow the use of data and research materials. Data should also be acknowledged as product of research and their intellectual property should be protected.

There is not enough space in this chapter to address all aspects of research data practices. We have moved from physical laboratory books to online data laboratory diaries and large datasets as a standard research practice. This has brought great benefits, especially in research with “big data”, but has also created problems. Whereas the mismanagement of research data is considered a detrimental research practice, it is often found in cases of research misconduct, which brought about the calls to consider data mismanagement as an act research misconduct, i.e. fraud, in some cases [39]. There are also calls to implement the FAIR principles not at the end of the research process, when the data gathering and analysis are complete, but throughout the research process, and for each data produced in individual experiments or studies [40].

We will have to follow the rapid developments in this field, especially the use of open repositories and specifically the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) as a “trusted, virtual, federated environment … to store, share, process and reuse research digital objects (like publications, data and software” according to FAIR principles [6].

7 Collaborative Working

The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity [10] requires researchers to take the responsibility for collaborative research, whether the research is between individual researchers, their institutions, across geographical or sector boundaries. Research collaboration is not only about the results of such research endeavour, but also about the accountability and openness at every stage of research, from its beginning. The collaborators should formally agree on the expectations and standards in collaborative research, on how the intellectual property of research outputs will be protected, and how conflicts or research misconduct will be addressed.

There is not much evidence on what works best for successful and responsible collaborative research, but there is guidance from international consultations on this topic. The Montreal Statement of Research Integrity in Cross-Boundary Research Collaborations [41] defines general collaborative responsibilities of researchers and their institutions (integrity; trust; purpose; and goals), their responsibilities in managing the collaboration (communication; agreements; compliance with laws, policies and regulations; costs and rewards; transparency; resource management; and monitoring), responsibilities in collaborative relationships (roles and responsibilities; customary practices and assumptions; conflict; and authority of representation), and responsibilities for the outcome of research (data, intellectual property and research records; publication; authorship and acknowledgment; responding to irresponsible research practices; and accountability). Although collaborative research is often viewed as a characteristic of biomedical and natural sciences, integrity is an important aspect of intercultural research in social sciences and humanities [42].

Research collaboration occur between sectors, which can raise specific problems. For example, it has been shown that researchers from the industry sector differ in their perception of research integrity from their colleagues at universities [43]. In research involving patient and public involvement in research, accountability is an important part of the framework for such collaborations [44] and should be actively implemented in citizen science, as one of the ambitions in the European open science policy [6].

Collaborations across different types of borders create special problems for investigating allegations of research misconduct because of rather large differences in research integrity bodies, regulations and procedures [7]. The OECD Global Science Forum has suggested a practical guide for “Investigating Research Misconduct Allegations in International Collaborative Research Projects” [45]. It calls for the promotion of generally acceptable responsible research practices and compliance with the national law where the individual researcher is employed or is based, or where research takes place or where the facilities for the project may be located. Standard investigation procedures should include agreement on with who and where the responsibility for the investigation lies, and the procedure to be followed, with all parties providing assistance with the investigation.

8 Publication and Dissemination; Reviewing, Evaluating and Editing

I am addressing the last two good research practices from the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity in a single section because they represent the two sides of the same concept: researchers publishing and communicating their work and researchers taking part in the evaluation of research results, be they reviewers of grant proposal, journal articles or research advancement request or journal editors.

As authors, researchers take the responsibility for their work presented in a publication, they agree on authorship of their works, and make their work available to the colleagues, including both positive and negative results. They also have to be honest when they communicate the results of their research to the media and the public, as well as they declare their activities and relationships that may create conflict of interest with regard to the submitted research. They should also acknowledge the contributions of individuals who have influenced their work, including accurate citations of previously published research. They are also responsible for correcting the published record of their work when it is necessary.

When they act as reviewers or evaluators of journal manuscripts, grant proposals or appointment, promotion or reward submission, they must do it in a responsible manner and without conflicts of interest. They have to maintain the confidentiality of the process when required and respect the rights of authors of the work they evaluate.

There is ample body of research, including interventions to improve different aspects of the publication and evaluation process, so I will here focus on some of the emerging issues, such as peer review, preprints and the use of AI in manuscript writing, and the “oldest” issue in publishing – authorship. Generally, we know from more than 30 years of research into peer review and scientific publication that this type of research is burdened by all challenges as other research field, including a significant publication bias, and lack of studies with rigorous methodology to test potential interventions [46].

With regard to authorship, my research group has performed a number of studies, including randomized controlled trials to demonstrate that different format of declaring authorship contributions do not work well for determining deserved authorship [19], and that the decisions on authorship are based on moral- rather than rule-based reasoning [47]. Based on our research, we believe that it is fairer to ask authors why they think they deserve to be authors on an article and publish this information [48], and that discussion about authorship should not occur at the end of the research study, but should be a part of the research protocol and monitored during the study [49]. A recent systematic review of the ethics of the Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT) system of declaring authorship in published articles also showed that the categorization of authorship contributions does not prevent unethical attribution of authorship [50] and that a structural transformation of the scientific process and scholarly publication is needed to promote honest, responsible, and above all, deserving authorship.

Peer review has a central role in assuring the quality of published research, but we still do not know what is the best way to do it, either for journal articles [46] or grant proposals [51]. However, there is a lot of experimentation and innovation going on in the field of peer review, from traditional double- or single-blind peer review to open peer review, as well as results-free, consultative and post-publication peer review [52]. It will be interesting to see the results from the evaluation of these news practices.

Another innovation in scientific publishing are preprints – complete versions of a research manuscript that have not been peer reviewed [53]. Preprints are very common in some research discipline, especially physics, but the COVID-19 pandemic has introduced them into other fields, like medicine, which had been generally skeptical about the usefulness of preprints and aware of public health hazards from research that has not passed a quality control. However, it seems that preprints are here to stay, and we will need to answer many questions and resolve dilemmas about their use. The editorial and publishing community is working on ensuring that there is clear indexing and linking of preprints with the published versions of the article and that the responsibilities for the integrity of the published records are defined for all stakeholders [53].

It is fitting to close this section with the newest challenge in scientific publishing – the use of AI, i.e. computer programmes that can process human conversation and simulate it in communication with human. There are already several published articles where the AI (ChatGPT programme) was listed as a co-author [54]. Apart from philosophical question of sentience of a computer programme, the use of AI in scientific writing also raises research integrity issues, particularly with regard to deserving authorship, conflict of interest and potential plagiarism. Just as with preprints, it seems that AI is going to be increasingly used in writing research papers. However, at the moment it is a (very impressive and powerful) tool, but not an author. The current position of journal editors in biomedicine is that [54]: a) a ChatGPT cannot be an author because it cannot satisfy the current authorship criteria in biomedicine (approval of publication and taking accountability for content); b) it does not understand its conflict of interest and cannot legally sign a statement or hold copyright; c) (human) authors have to be transparent how and where AI tool was used in the paper; and d) (human) authors are responsible for the work performed by AI on their paper, including the accuracy of what is presented, including references cited, and the absence of plagiarism. The future for the publishing world will surely bring new tools for editors to detect parts of the papers written by AI [54].

9 Instead of a Conclusion

This chapter does not have a conclusion, because there are so many existing and rapidly emerging challenges to responsible research and integrity of researchers. We have to be aware that the future will bring some solutions, as well as new challenges. What we have to keep in mind is that, if we want research to be responsible and performed with integrity of all participants, we should look for facts and not follow authorities, and learn as much as we can so that we can make evidence-based policies that work for the benefit of the global community of humanity.