How can research institutions support responsible supervision and leadership?

ABSTRACT

Supervisors, PhD candidates and research leaders are expected to be the primary persons responsible for maintaining a high research integrity standards. However, research institutions should support them in this effort, by promoting responsible supervision and leadership practices. Although it is clear that institutions play a crucial role in this, there is a lack of institutional guidelines focusing on these topics. The development of the experience-based guidelines presented in this article consisted of a multi-step, iterative approach. We engaged 16 experts in supervision and research integrity in four workshops to co-create institutional guidelines for responsible supervision and leadership. To revise the guidelines and make them operational, we formed a dedicated working group and consulted experts in the field of supervision. This resulted in three guidelines focusing on what institutions can do to support: responsible supervision, PhD candidates during their PhD trajectory, and responsible leadership. The recommendations focus on the rights and responsibilities of the three targeted stakeholder groups, and institutions’ responsibilities for the personal development and well-being of supervisors, PhD candidates and research leaders. The three guidelines can be used by institutions to foster responsible supervision and leadership by supporting researchers to conduct research with integrity.

KEYWORDS:

• Supervision
• leadership
• PhD trajectory
• PhD candidates
• guidelines
• institutional responsibilities
• research integrity

List of abbreviations

RI: Research integrity

QRPs: Questionable research practices

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the co-creation workshop participants, including Michał B. Paradowski, Vitalii Gryga, Giulia Inguaggiato and Ivan Buljan for their contribution.

We would like to thank Pieter Jan Stappers and Katinka Bergema for their valuable advice on co-creation methodology and their contribution to the study design. We would also like to thank all members of the SOPs4RI project who contributed to the various stages of the guideline development process, and the co-creation project including Iris Lechner, Nik Claesen and BoranaTaraj.

Authors’ contributions

DP contributed to the design of the co-creation workshops and analyzed the resulting data, and drafted and revised the manuscript. KL contributed to the preliminary steps of the guideline development process, designed the co-creation workshops and analyzed the resulting data, and drafted and revised the manuscript. NAB contributed towards the co-creation workshop data analysis, designed the protocol used in the working group for the refinement of the guidelines, and revised the manuscript. KD and NE contributed to the co-creation workshop study design and revision of the manuscript. JT, RR, and PK were members of the working group for the refinement of the guidelines. RR, PK and NS also revised the manuscript. JT contributed to the preliminary steps of the guideline development process, revised the co-creation workshop study protocol and collected the resulting data, revised the manuscript, and supervised the work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Availability of data and materials

Due to privacy reasons, the co-creation workshop transcripts used for this article are not publicly available. However, we have made the anonymized codebook, including quotes, that is present as an electronic supplement.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the European Commission HORIZON 2020 framework programme for Research and Innovation under Grant Agreement Νo 824481. The funder was not involved in the design, conduct, analysis or interpretation of the stud; Horizon 2020 Framework Programme.