Abstract
Promoting research integrity practices among doctoral candidates and early career researchers is important for creating a stable and healthy research environment. In addition to teaching specific technical skills and knowledge, research supervisors and mentors inevitably convey research practices, both directly and indirectly. We conducted a scoping review to summarise the role of mentors in fostering research integrity practices, mentors’ responsibilities and the role that institutions have in supporting good mentorship. We searched five different databases and included studies that used an empirical methodology. After searching, a total of 1199 articles were retrieved, of which 24 were eligible for analysis. After snowballing, a total of 35 empirical articles were selected. The review discusses various themes such as the importance of good mentorship, poor mentorship practices, virtues and qualities of mentors, responsibilities and activities of mentors, group mentoring and responsibilities of the institution in supporting good mentorship. This review demonstrates the importance of mentors instilling responsible research practices and attitudes, and promoting research integrity among their mentees. Mentors are responsible for providing explicit guidance and for acting as good role models. The review highlights how poor mentorship can have a bad impact on the research climate. In addition, the review highlights the important influence that institutions can have in supporting mentorship.
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Data Availability
Supplement 1—Characterisation of the articles, Supplement 2—Publications for specific thematic group.
Notes
“Snowballing” refers to a specific practice used in literature review in which references listed on a paper and citations to the paper are used to enrich the pool of papers retrieved in the primary search (Greenhalgh & Peacock, 2005).
For this paper, we included the biomedical sciences in the life sciences as used by the European Research Council. (ERC- https://ec.europaeu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/docs/2021–2027/horizon/wp-call/2022/wp_horizonerc-2022_en.pdf).
Abbreviations
- GRPs:
-
Good research practices
- ORI:
-
Office of research integrity
- QRP:
-
Questionable research practice
- RCR:
-
Responsible conduct of research
- RI:
-
Research integrity
- SOP:
-
Standard operating procedure
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the EC funded project VIRT2UE (Virtue based ethics and Integrity of Research: Train-the-Trainer program for Upholding the principles and practices of the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity) has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement N 787580. VIRT2UE aims to develop a sustainable train-the-trainer blended learning programme enabling contextualised research integrity and ethics teaching across Europe focusing on understanding and upholding the principles and practices of the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity. The VIRT2UE Consortium is composed of the VU Medical Center Amsterdam, KU Leuven, University of Split School of Medicine, Austrian Agency for Research Integrity, University of Oslo, European Network of Research Ethics Committees, Ankara University, National Technical University of Athens, University of Helsinki, University of Latvia, Universidade Catolica Portuguesa, University of Insubria, and Momkai. We would like to thank Roshni Jegan for proofreading the articles. Moreover, we would like to thank the reviewers for their insightful comments, for providing directions for additional work which has resulted in this manuscript and for elevating the quality of the paper.
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This research is part of the VIRT2UE project. The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research program under grant agreement N 787580. The funding institution had no role in designing the study. Furthermore, the funding institution did not take part in the collection, analysis and interpretation of the data and in writing the manuscript.
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Pizzolato, D., Dierickx, K. The Mentor’s Role in Fostering Research Integrity Standards Among New Generations of Researchers: A Review of Empirical Studies. Sci Eng Ethics 29, 19 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-023-00439-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-023-00439-z