Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore.
BMC Med Ethics. 2021 Jul 28;22(1):103. doi: 10.1186/s12910-021-00662-y.
Institutions, funding agencies and publishers are placing increasing emphasis on good research data management (RDM). RDM lapses in medical science can result in questionable data and cause the public's confidence in the scientific community to crumble. A fledgling medical school in a young university in Singapore has mandated every funded research project to have a data management plan (DMP). However, researchers' adherence to their DMPs was unknown until the school embarked on routine data auditing. We hypothesize that research data auditing improves RDM awareness, compliance and reception in the school.
We conducted surveys with research PIs and researchers before and after data auditing to evaluate differences in self-reported RDM awareness, compliance and reception. As it is mandatory to deposit research data in a central data repository system in the school, we tracked data deposition by each laboratory from 2 weeks before to 3 months after data auditing as a marker of actual RDM compliance.
Research data auditing had an overall positive effect on self-reported RDM awareness, compliance and reception for both research PIs and researchers. Research PIs agreed more that RDM was important to scientific reproducibility, were more aware of proper RDM, had higher RDM strength in their laboratories and were more compliant with the DMP. Both research PIs and researchers believed data auditing helped them to be more compliant with data deposition in the repository. However, data auditing had no significant impact on laboratories' data deposition rates over time, which could be due to the short sampling period.
Research PIs and researchers generally felt that data auditing was effective in improving RDM practices. It helped to evaluate their RDM practices objectively, propose corrective actions for RDM lapses and spread awareness of the university's data management policies. Our findings corroborated other studies in medical research, geosciences, engineering and ethics that data auditing promotes good RDM practices. Hence, we recommend research institutions worldwide to adopt data auditing as a tool to reinforce research integrity.
各机构、资助机构和出版商越发重视良好的研究数据管理（RDM）。医学科研中的 RDM 失误可能导致数据质量存疑，并使公众对科学界的信心动摇。新加坡一所年轻大学的新建医学院要求每一个有经费资助的研究项目都要有数据管理计划（DMP）。然而，在该校开始进行常规数据审计之前，其研究人员对 DMP 的遵守情况尚不清楚。我们假设研究数据审计可以提高学校的 RDM 意识、合规性和接受度。
在数据审计前后，我们对研究负责人和研究人员进行了调查，以评估自我报告的 RDM 意识、合规性和接受度的差异。由于在学校，研究数据必须存入中央数据存储库系统，因此，我们从数据审计前两周到后三个月追踪了每个实验室的数据存储情况，以此作为实际 RDM 合规性的标志。
数据审计对研究负责人和研究人员的 RDM 意识、合规性和接受度都有整体的积极影响。研究负责人更认同 RDM 对科学可重复性的重要性，对正确的 RDM 方法有了更高的认识，他们所在实验室的 RDM 力度也更强，对 DMP 的遵守程度更高。研究负责人和研究人员都认为数据审计有助于他们更遵守在存储库中存储数据的要求。然而，数据审计并没有显著影响实验室随时间推移的数据存储率，这可能是由于采样时间较短。
研究负责人和研究人员普遍认为数据审计在改进 RDM 实践方面是有效的。它有助于客观评估他们的 RDM 实践，为 RDM 失误提出纠正措施，并提高对大学数据管理政策的认识。我们的研究结果与医学研究、地球科学、工程和伦理学中的其他研究结果一致，即数据审计可以促进良好的 RDM 实践。因此，我们建议全球各地的研究机构采用数据审计作为强化研究诚信的工具。
