scholarly journals Reforms to improve reproducibility and quality must be coordinated across the research ecosystem: The view from the UKRN Local Network Leads

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne Stewart ◽  
Charlotte Rebecca Pennington ◽  
Gonçalo Silva ◽  
Nick Ballou ◽  
Jessica Butler ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Research Integrity ◽  
Research Quality ◽  
Local Network ◽  
Research Practice ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Research Culture ◽  
Positive Research ◽  
Working Together ◽  
Fit For Purpose ◽  
The Uk

Many disciplines are facing a “reproducibility crisis”, ushering in much discussion about how to improve research integrity, reproducibility, and transparency. A unified effort across all sectors, levels, and stages of the research ecosystem is needed to coordinate goals and reforms that focus on open and transparent research practices, while promoting a more positive incentive culture for all. In this commentary, we - the Local Network Leads of the UK Reproducibility Network - outline our response to the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee’s inquiry on research integrity and reproducibility. We argue that the four areas for effective actions are to coordinate: (1) a positive research culture, (2) a unified stance on improving research quality, (3) common foundations for open and transparent research practice, and (4) the routinisation of this practice. For each of these areas, we outline the role that individuals, institutions, funders, publishers, and Government play in shaping the research ecosystem. Working together, these constituent members must also partner with sectoral and coordinating organisations to produce effective and long-lasting reforms that are fit-for-purpose and future-proof. These efforts will strengthen research quality and create research capable of generating far-reaching applications with a sustained impact on society.

16. Select Committees

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Kelso
Keyword(s):  
Foster Care ◽  
Membership Committee ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Select Committee ◽  
Committee Work ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
Working Together ◽  
The Uk

This chapter examines the role of select committees in the UK Parliament, and more specifically how they enable lawmakers in the House of Commons to pool their scrutiny efforts by working together as a formally constituted team. Select committees are cross-party, with membership restricted to backbench Members of Parliament (MPs) and reflecting the party balance in the House. These committees determine their own work agendas and decide for themselves which topics to investigate. Committee work is structured around running focused inquiries into specific issues, ranging from antisemitism to foster care. The chapter first considers the effectiveness of select committees before discussing some major developments that the departmental select committee system has undergone over the last four decades with regard to elected committee chairs and membership, committee activity, addressing highly controversial topics, and developing policy expertise.

scholarly journals Improving research quality: the view from the UK Reproducibility Network institutional leads for research improvement

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Stewart ◽  
Emily K. Farran ◽  
James A. Grange ◽  
Malcolm Macleod ◽  
Marcus Munafò ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Research Output ◽  
Research Integrity ◽  
Research Strategy ◽  
Research Quality ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Research Activity ◽  
Research Practices ◽  
Key Stakeholders ◽  
Research Organisations ◽  
The Uk

AbstractThe adoption and incentivisation of open and transparent research practices is critical in addressing issues around research reproducibility and research integrity. These practices will require training and funding. Individuals need to be incentivised to adopt open and transparent research practices (e.g., added as desirable criteria in hiring, probation, and promotion decisions, recognition that funded research should be conducted openly and transparently, the importance of publishers mandating the publication of research workflows and appropriately curated data associated with each research output). Similarly, institutions need to be incentivised to encourage the adoption of open and transparent practices by researchers. Research quality should be prioritised over research quantity. As research transparency will look different for different disciplines, there can be no one-size-fits-all approach. An outward looking and joined up UK research strategy is needed that places openness and transparency at the heart of research activity. This should involve key stakeholders (institutions, research organisations, funders, publishers, and Government) and crucially should be focused on action. Failure to do this will have negative consequences not just for UK research, but also for our ability to innovate and subsequently commercialise UK-led discovery.

A benefits analysis of partnering: A case study of a community primary school

2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
M Emsley
Keyword(s):  
Primary School ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Team Working ◽  
Best Value ◽  
Borough Council ◽  
Working Together ◽  
Fit For Purpose ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Specific Project

Partnering, which involves all members of the project team working together to improve performance through agreeing mutual objectives, is a construct; on procurement strategy encouraged by the UK Government, as it believed that such a strategy will provide best value, which is an aspect especially critical for public clients. Partnering may be strategic or applied to a specific project only. A regionally based main contractor (MC) constructed the Community Primary School (CPS) for a Metropolitan Borough Council (MBC) using a project partnering arrangement; such an arrangement was also in place between the main contractor and its key sub‐contractors. The overall conclusion, derived from the analysis of a case study carried out on the project, is that the CPS project has been a very successful project. Broadly, it was completed ahead of schedule, an achievement which undoubtedly would not have been possible without the use of partnering which allowed an overlap of the design and construction activities, there was a slight overspend above budget, the health and safety of people involved in its construction was not compromised and the finished product is of a high quality, fit for purpose.

scholarly journals Reproducibility and research integrity in applied linguistics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cylcia Bolibaugh ◽  
Emma Marsden
Keyword(s):  
Applied Linguistics ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Research Integrity ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Concerted Effort ◽  
Full Disclosure ◽  
Non Profit ◽  
Publishing Houses ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Support Research

This preprint contains the text of a submission of written evidence to the UK Parliament, House of Commons Science and Technology Committee inquiry on reproducibility and research integrity (submitted: 24 September 2021. Viewable on the parliament website). In our review of the breadth of the reproducibility crisis within applied linguistics, we emphasise the necessity for full disclosure of data and code as well as full provision of experimental materials and protocols. We also highlight the critical role research funders have in supporting the field-specific open digital infrastructures which are needed to support research reproducibility. Finally, we call for a concerted effort to reduce the power of the large publishing houses and support society-led publishing efforts, and non-profit publication platforms.

scholarly journals A semi-supervised approach for rapidly creating clinical biomarker phenotypes in the UK Biobank using different primary care EHR and clinical terminology systems

JAMIA Open ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Spiros Denaxas ◽  
Anoop D Shah ◽  
Bilal A Mateen ◽  
Valerie Kuan ◽  
Jennifer K Quint ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Primary Care ◽  
Proportional Hazards ◽  
Biomarker Discovery ◽  
Data Extraction ◽  
Cox Proportional Hazards ◽  
Research Quality ◽  
Uk Biobank ◽  
Expert Review ◽  
Cox Proportional Hazards Models ◽  
The Uk

Abstract Objectives The UK Biobank (UKB) is making primary care electronic health records (EHRs) for 500 000 participants available for COVID-19-related research. Data are extracted from four sources, recorded using five clinical terminologies and stored in different schemas. The aims of our research were to: (a) develop a semi-supervised approach for bootstrapping EHR phenotyping algorithms in UKB EHR, and (b) to evaluate our approach by implementing and evaluating phenotypes for 31 common biomarkers. Materials and Methods We describe an algorithmic approach to phenotyping biomarkers in primary care EHR involving (a) bootstrapping definitions using existing phenotypes, (b) excluding generic, rare, or semantically distant terms, (c) forward-mapping terminology terms, (d) expert review, and (e) data extraction. We evaluated the phenotypes by assessing the ability to reproduce known epidemiological associations with all-cause mortality using Cox proportional hazards models. Results We created and evaluated phenotyping algorithms for 31 biomarkers many of which are directly related to COVID-19 complications, for example diabetes, cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease. Our algorithm identified 1651 Read v2 and Clinical Terms Version 3 terms and automatically excluded 1228 terms. Clinical review excluded 103 terms and included 44 terms, resulting in 364 terms for data extraction (sensitivity 0.89, specificity 0.92). We extracted 38 190 682 events and identified 220 978 participants with at least one biomarker measured. Discussion and conclusion Bootstrapping phenotyping algorithms from similar EHR can potentially address pre-existing methodological concerns that undermine the outputs of biomarker discovery pipelines and provide research-quality phenotyping algorithms.

scholarly journals Playing to the Gallery: Emotive Rhetoric in Parliaments

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
MORITZ OSNABRÜGGE ◽  
SARA B. HOBOLT ◽  
TONI RODON
Keyword(s):  
Political Representation ◽  
Word Embedding ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
General Audience ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Affective Norms ◽  
The Uk

Research has shown that emotions matter in politics, but we know less about when and why politicians use emotive rhetoric in the legislative arena. This article argues that emotive rhetoric is one of the tools politicians can use strategically to appeal to voters. Consequently, we expect that legislators are more likely to use emotive rhetoric in debates that have a large general audience. Our analysis covers two million parliamentary speeches held in the UK House of Commons and the Irish Parliament. We use a dictionary-based method to measure emotive rhetoric, combining the Affective Norms for English Words dictionary with word-embedding techniques to create a domain-specific dictionary. We show that emotive rhetoric is more pronounced in high-profile legislative debates, such as Prime Minister’s Questions. These findings contribute to the study of legislative speech and political representation by suggesting that emotive rhetoric is used by legislators to appeal directly to voters.

scholarly journals Rethinking success, integrity, and culture in research (part 2) — a multi-actor qualitative study on problems of science

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Noémie Aubert Bonn ◽  
Wim Pinxten
Keyword(s):  
Research Misconduct ◽  
Research Integrity ◽  
Research Culture ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Questionable Research Practices ◽  
Research Problems ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Research Students ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Background Research misconduct and questionable research practices have been the subject of increasing attention in the past few years. But despite the rich body of research available, few empirical works also include the perspectives of non-researcher stakeholders. Methods We conducted semi-structured interviews and focus groups with policy makers, funders, institution leaders, editors or publishers, research integrity office members, research integrity community members, laboratory technicians, researchers, research students, and former-researchers who changed career to inquire on the topics of success, integrity, and responsibilities in science. We used the Flemish biomedical landscape as a baseline to be able to grasp the views of interacting and complementary actors in a system setting. Results Given the breadth of our results, we divided our findings in a two-paper series with the current paper focusing on the problems that affect the integrity and research culture. We first found that different actors have different perspectives on the problems that affect the integrity and culture of research. Problems were either linked to personalities and attitudes, or to the climates in which researchers operate. Elements that were described as essential for success (in the associate paper) were often thought to accentuate the problems of research climates by disrupting research culture and research integrity. Even though all participants agreed that current research climates need to be addressed, participants generally did not feel responsible nor capable of initiating change. Instead, respondents revealed a circle of blame and mistrust between actor groups. Conclusions Our findings resonate with recent debates, and extrapolate a few action points which might help advance the discussion. First, the research integrity debate must revisit and tackle the way in which researchers are assessed. Second, approaches to promote better science need to address the impact that research climates have on research integrity and research culture rather than to capitalize on individual researchers’ compliance. Finally, inter-actor dialogues and shared decision making must be given priority to ensure that the perspectives of the full research system are captured. Understanding the relations and interdependency between these perspectives is key to be able to address the problems of science. Study registration https://osf.io/33v3m

scholarly journals Rethinking success, integrity, and culture in research (part 1) — a multi-actor qualitative study on success in science

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Noémie Aubert Bonn ◽  
Wim Pinxten
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Focus Groups ◽  
Research Integrity ◽  
Current Paper ◽  
Research Quality ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
The Past ◽  
Research Students

Abstract Background Success shapes the lives and careers of scientists. But success in science is difficult to define, let alone to translate in indicators that can be used for assessment. In the past few years, several groups expressed their dissatisfaction with the indicators currently used for assessing researchers. But given the lack of agreement on what should constitute success in science, most propositions remain unanswered. This paper aims to complement our understanding of success in science and to document areas of tension and conflict in research assessments. Methods We conducted semi-structured interviews and focus groups with policy makers, funders, institution leaders, editors or publishers, research integrity office members, research integrity community members, laboratory technicians, researchers, research students, and former-researchers who changed career to inquire on the topics of success, integrity, and responsibilities in science. We used the Flemish biomedical landscape as a baseline to be able to grasp the views of interacting and complementary actors in a system setting. Results Given the breadth of our results, we divided our findings in a two-paper series, with the current paper focusing on what defines and determines success in science. Respondents depicted success as a multi-factorial, context-dependent, and mutable construct. Success appeared to be an interaction between characteristics from the researcher (Who), research outputs (What), processes (How), and luck. Interviewees noted that current research assessments overvalued outputs but largely ignored the processes deemed essential for research quality and integrity. Interviewees suggested that science needs a diversity of indicators that are transparent, robust, and valid, and that also allow a balanced and diverse view of success; that assessment of scientists should not blindly depend on metrics but also value human input; and that quality should be valued over quantity. Conclusions The objective of research assessments may be to encourage good researchers, to benefit society, or simply to advance science. Yet we show that current assessments fall short on each of these objectives. Open and transparent inter-actor dialogue is needed to understand what research assessments aim for and how they can best achieve their objective. Study Registration osf.io/33v3m.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document