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Research Integrity

The School of Human and Behavioural Sciences conducts world-leading research spanning human physiology, neuroscience, elite performance, and wellbeing. We are committed to safeguarding honesty, accuracy, and transparency in all that we do, and consider these principles essential to fostering a healthy research environment and securing trust in – and therefore the societal impact of – our research. As broader systemic pressures such as the academic incentive structure can present an obstacle to these principles, a factor recognised by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the School of Human and Behavioural Sciences has taken concrete steps to ensure the highest levels of research integrity.

Designated academic leads and services

As a top priority of the Executive Team, the School of Human and Behavioural Sciences has established formal administrative roles dedicated to research integrity and open science principles. These include:

In addition, Bangor University has a number of bodies committed to research integrity and improvement, including the Integrated Research and Impact Support (IRIS) service, and the Research Data Management and Collaboration Hub services within Library and Archives.

Affiliations

The School of Human and Behavioural Sciences comprises a local network of the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN): “A peer-led consortium that aims to ensure the UK retains its place as a centre for world-leading research, by investigating the factors that contribute to robust research, promoting training activities and disseminating best practice, and working with external stakeholders – organisations that are part of the wider research ecosystem – to ensure coordination of efforts across the sector.” The School of Human and Behavioural Sciences is also affiliated with numerous grassroots initiatives such as ReproducibiliTea, of which we are a local chapter, and the Commitment to Research Transparency. These affiliations provide a public record of our commitment to research integrity and enable us to stay at the cutting-edge of best practice.

‘Open science’ practices

Our researchers engage comprehensively with open science approaches. This includes the use – where practical and feasible – of pre-registration and registered reports, and pre-printing and data sharing, either through a lab-specific repository hosted via a service such as the Open Science Framework or bioRxiv, or via Bangor University’s own designated Research Portal.

Training and teaching

The School of Human and Behavioural Sciences hosts regular ‘best practice’ development opportunities on topics such as statistics, coding and computational environment management, and navigating public data repositories. We also host a ReproducibiliTea meetup at which we discuss metascience, from methods and the philosophy of science to the academic landscape. All are welcome to attend these sessions.

In order to develop future research leaders and nurture students with highly transferable skill sets, we embed the principles of research integrity, ethics, and open science into our teaching from the outset. From undergraduate level our students are exposed to issues such as reproducibility, statistical power, p-hacking and HARKing, and sampling bias, and are encouraged to work collaboratively and preregister their analyses during projects. We also promote the use of open-source software throughout our teaching.