ReproducibiliTeach: Strategies to make your research more transparent, robust & reproducible

Concerned about the reproducibility crisis? Wondering what you can do to make your research more transparent, robust & reproducible? Looking for hands-on experience and expert advice? Make your own research instantly more transparent, robust & reproducible.

Participants in the hands-on ReproducibiliTeach workshop, offered by QUEST and NeuroCure, will learn to identify common problems that affect transparency and reproducibility and work on implementing better practices in their own research.

Course description

This course follows the flipped classroom principle. Participants are required to watch a recorded lecture focussed on common practices for more transparent and reproducible alternatives prior to the workshops.

In these lectures, they learn the theoretical background and skills needed to apply these concepts to their own research. During the workshops, participants ask questions, apply concepts to their own research, learn from others’ experiences and get feedback from instructors and classmates. Instructors will provide support and guidance.

After completion of the course, participants will have implemented practices to make their research more transparent and reproducible, and shared their knowledge with others in their research group.

Target audience

This course is designed for biomedical researchers working on small sample size studies, including preclinical (animal) research, in vitro research, or human research with small numbers of participants. Some topics may also be relevant to researchers working with larger sample sizes.

Eligibility

This course is open to researchers in the biomedical or biological sciences at Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin, or Technische Universität Berlin.

Additional spaces are available to participants from the NeuroCure Cluster of Excellence. NeuroCure participants should indicate their affiliation during the registration process.

Instructors

Tracey L. Weissgerber, Ph.D.
Group Leader
Berlin Institute of Health at Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany
BIH QUEST Center for Responsible Research
Email: tracey.weissgerber@bih-charite.de

Dr. Weissgerber is a meta-researcher at QUEST (Quality | Ethics | Open Science | Translation) in Berlin. She completed her graduate work in physiology at Queen’s University (Canada), a post-doctoral fellowship at the Magee-Women’s Research Institute (USA), and was an Assistant Professor at Mayo Clinic (USA). Her 2015 paper on bar graphs has been viewed more than 400,000 times. This paper contributed to policy changes in many journals that encourage authors to replace bar graphs of continuous data with more informative graphics (dot plots, box plots, violin plots).

Dr. René Bernard
Coordinator for Value and Open Science
NeuroCure Cluster of Excellence
Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin
Email: rene.bernard@charite.de
ORCID

Dr. Bernard is a trained pharmacist, pharmacologist, and currently works as Coordinator for Research Value and Open Science in the NeuroCure Cluster of Excellence. In addition to neuroscientific research, he worked for several years in an academica-industry collaboration and helped to develop two quality management systems designed for preclinical research. He is committed to promoting good research practice, as laid out in this open access book Good Research Practice in Non-Clinical Pharmacology and Biomedicine, to which he contributed.

ECTS & time commitment

We will provide a signed certificate to help participants obtain ECTS credit from their institution or department. You must attend all 5 sessions to receive a certificate over 0,8 ECTS and have watched the lectures prior to class.

As this course is open for participants from various programmes, obtaining formal approval from each programme is not feasible. Participants themselves are responsible for ensuring that they will receive credit for the course.

Learning objectives

After completing the course, students will have:

Week 1 

• Identified the appropriate reporting guideline for their study and used that guideline as a writing guide to prepare a methods section
• Determined when blinding and randomisation are needed in their studies

Week 2 

• Explained the benefits of using research resource identifiers (RRIDs) and have added RRIDs to their manuscript or to the resource list from their lab
• Designed a flow chart to report attrition for a research study

Week 3 

• Critically evaluated scientific figures to identify and fix common data visualisation problems

Week 4 

• Ensured that any methodological citation shortcuts used to explain their methods follow best practices
• Deposited a research/method protocol applicable to their research on a dedicated protocol repository (decisions about whether to publicly share the protocol are up to participant and their colleagues)

Week 5 

• Prepared a data spreadsheet and data dictionary to record study data
• Data upload to the general purpose repository Zenodo