Titled ‘Guidance document – Good academic research practices’, the UGC document also calls for setting up an office at each institution to ensure best practices.
The University Grants Commission (UGC) Tuesday released detailed guidelines to provide a framework for good research practices across institutions in India. It presents information on how to choose a research topic, collect data, arrive at findings, and avoid plagiarism.
Titled ‘Guidance document – Good academic research practices’, the document also called for setting up an Office of Research Integrity (ORI) at each institution to ensure that the best practices are followed.
“Each institution is different and may use this framework as it best applies to its own context,” the document said.
Under its Vice Chairman Bhushan Patwardhan and other academicians, the UGC has been trying to work on improving the research standards in Indian universities. This latest document is an effort in that direction.
What the guidelines say
According to the guidelines, researchers should have clarity about the questions they are asking in their research and the rationale before planning the research.
“While translation of research comes at a later stage, researchers should proactively think about the downstream impact. Does the project potentially have positive outcomes for society, industry, country, or the ecosystem in general?” it said.
It also enumerated the ways in which a researcher should store data. “A researcher needs to ensure — clear data ownership and accountability; data integrity by using a copy of the original data; careful and reliable data collection, storage, and retrieval among other things,” it said.
Data that cannot be easily reproduced should be retained indefinitely, the document added.
It also highlighted the ethics of research, explaining the difference between ‘fabrication’ —making up data or results — and ‘plagiarism’ — the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit — and ‘falsification’ —manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes, or changing or omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the research record.
The guidelines asked researchers to stay away from such malpractices and ensure that their work is original and not fabricated.
It also explained that research findings can be translated to real life application if a researcher focuses on — research that is aimed at real world problems; uses widely available materials and components, feasible on a large scale, and pose minimum hazard to life and the environment to aid manufacturing; maintain complete records of all experimentation and surveys so that technologies can be reliably and efficiently scaled up.
The guidelines also detailed how a researcher can chose an appropriate journal for the publication of the research.
The questions that a researcher should keep in mind while choosing a journal are — whether the aims and scope of the journal match that of the research; whether the journal has published articles of similar nature; what is the journal peer review process; and if the journal reaches the relevant audience.
