"Good Research Practice" – what does that mean?

 I’ve been thinking a lot about Research Practice in the past months, from a variety of perspectives. Of course, there’s a lot been said and written about it, and I’ve been doing a lot of listening and reading too. But to synthesise all I’ve learned over my career, with all the new things I’ve learned recently, I find myself in a bit of a muddle.

In these sort of cases, I’ve found that going back to first principles can be really useful to try and ground my thinking. So, on that basis, what do we mean when we say something is “good research practice”? “Good” I think we can (hopefully) all agree on (or at least the definition of  "good" can be considered out of scope for the moment) – so that breaks down to what research practice is, because we need to know how to do it before we can do it (or is that a bit chicken and egg there?).

To Google! A search for “research practice” (in my geographical area at least) provides as the first result the UKRI policy on the governance of good research practice (GRP). This is an interesting policy document in that it clearly lays out the responsibilities of the various parties (funders, institutions, researcher) when it comes to research integrity and research misconduct, but it doesn’t say much about what good research practice is.

Now, to be fair, this may very well be because different research domains do research in radically different domains, so it’s easier to list what counts as research misconduct, than it is to say what research practice actually looks like. (The UKRI GRP policy has Appendix 2 devoted to defining what research misconduct is.)

The UKRI Good Research Resource Hub is another interesting site which gives guidance on important research topics including open research, research integrity, equality, diversity and inclusion, human research participants and many, many more. But it still doesn’t give you a recipe or definition of what research practice is.

A bit further down the search result we find [Schwab et.al., 2022], which does what it says in the title and provides “Ten simple rules for good research practice”. These are then broken up into three sections, according to the stage of the research, whether that’s planning, execution, or reporting.

These rules are (fig.1):

Planning     

• Specify your research question
• Write and register a study protocol
• Justify your sample size
• Write a data management plan
• Reduce bias

Execution

• Avoid questionable research practices
• Be cautious with interpretations of statistical significance
• Make your research open

Reporting

• Report all findings
• Follow reporting guidelines

 The authors then discuss these headings in more detail in the text.

So, that’s all sorted then, right?

Well, remember how I mentioned different domains earlier? Yes, it’s not quite as simple as that. The terms used in the Ten Rules above aren’t universal across all scientific research, let alone across all possible research (which includes the humanities and arts as well).

Let’s take a stab at generalising them, shall we?

Planning

• Decide what hypothesis you want to test/decide what information you want to find
• Decide your methodology, taking into account domain and community standards
• Will the data you’re collecting be enough for you to confirm your results with an appropriate degree of certainty? (How about error margins and statistical significance?)
•  Write your data management plan
• Are there any sources of bias in your data or your methods that need to be compensated for?
• Does your research have the potential to cause harm? If so, is it worth it? Can you mitigate the risks of that harm occurring?

Execution

• Do your research according to high standards of research integrity
• Be the best researcher with the highest integrity you can be
•  Be cautious with your interpretations
• Are there any other reasons why you might have got the results you did?
• Make your research as open as possible

Reporting

• Report all findings, and all the details of the research, the good, the bad and the ugly
• Try to make your research and component parts (data, code, workflows, etc.) FAIR
• Follow community standards and practices for reporting
• If possible, try to make those standards more open

Obviously, these are just preliminary thoughts on a subject with a lot of complexity, but hopefully they’re enough to get the brain cells working on this topic. And as always, figuring out where something isn’t quite right can be really helpful for determining what really works the best, given the circumstances.

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https://www.sanger.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Good-Research-Practice-Guidelines-v4-Feb-2021.pdf 

Schwab S, Janiaud P, Dayan M, Amrhein V, Panczak R, Palagi PM, et al. (2022) Ten simple rules for good research practice. PLoS Comput Biol 18(6): e1010139. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010139