Reporting on indicators of research integrity

Earlier this month, the UK Committee on Research Integrity, of which I am a member, published its work on the development of indicators of research integrity for use by higher education institutions (HEIs). You can access and read this report here.

The Committee undertook this project with two key objectives in mind:

• „ to build the evidence base for research integrity on a UK-wide scale, and to

• „ support HEIs to self assess and improve their support for research integrity

This report synthesises the evidence gathered from several stakeholder workshops, which we held across the UK from October 2023 to April 2024, and in which over 120 stakeholders participated. These workshops generated and reflected on 115 indicators of research integrity at HEIs across several domains of responsibility: leadership, strategy, procedures, practices and skills.

In the report, we share all 115 indicators that our stakeholders discussed and built on, and we highlight a short list of 16 potential indicators that can be used to understand the status and trajectory of the conditions that support research integrity in UK HEIs across each of the above domains. As we highlight in the report, it now for the research sector to assess whether this prioritised set of indicators support recognition of the conditions that foster research integrity. We also need to better understand the extent to which these indicators provide an evidence-base about research integrity in the UK now and into the future, and across HEIs of different sizes, disciplines and resources.

We hope that you and the wider research sector will find the report interesting and informative. Please do share it with your networks. And if you want to find out more about the SCOPE framework which we used to guide our work with stakeholders, please visit here.