Keeping scrupulous records and taking the right decision when managing outliers is fundamental to good practice in science. Less-than-ideal record keeping was also an issue that researchers at the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB) highlighted, in a recent survey, as one of the most common ‘questionable research practices’ in the building – as it has been shown to be elsewhere in other surveys.
That is why the PRBB started the year fostering good and honest science by organising a record-keeping and data-management campaign at the park. The initiative was led by the Good Scientific Practice working group, comprising members from all the PRBB centres, and it took place during the final week of January.
With the slogan “Good science, honest science”, the campaign had two parts:
- a “big quiz” comprising questions open for discussion via a website, twitter or at the restaurant;
- a series of specialist workshops addressing issues relating to the three different types of data more common at the PRBB:
- wet labs data – “Keeping the data record straight in the lab”
- computational biology data – “In silico data tsunami: will you survive?”
- human research – “Managing data in human research”
The workshops were co-organised and run by the GSP group members and other researchers at the different centres of the PRBB. Around two hundred people attended the sessions, which involved over twenty speakers, all researchers from PRBB centres. The participants took an active role in group discussions and informal chats over nibbles and listened to theoretical and practical points, providing plenty of opportunities for sharing experiences and exploring new ideas.
The Big Quiz questions were posted around the building and on the restaurant tables during the whole week, in order to test the researchers’ knowledge of data management as well as to spark a conversation about the topic. The PRBB scientists could also reply to the questions online.
You can see the questions and the responses, as well as all the presentations used in the workshops, in this article at the prbbgoodpractice website.
