Effectiveness of data auditing as a tool to reinforce good research data management (RDM) practice: a Singapore study

BACKGROUND: Institutions, funding agencies and publishers are placing increasing emphasis on good research data management (RDM). RDM lapses in medical science can result in questionable data and cause the public’s confidence in the scientific community to crumble. A fledgling medical school in a young university in Singapore has mandated every funded research project to have a data management plan (DMP). However, researchers’ adherence to their DMPs was unknown until the school embarked on routine data auditing. We hypothesize that research data auditing improves RDM awareness, compliance and reception in the school. METHODS: We conducted surveys with research PIs and researchers before and after data auditing to evaluate differences in self-reported RDM awareness, compliance and reception. As it is mandatory to deposit research data in a central data repository system in the school, we tracked data deposition by each laboratory from 2 weeks before to 3 months after data auditing as a marker of actual RDM compliance. RESULTS: Research data auditing had an overall positive effect on self-reported RDM awareness, compliance and reception for both research PIs and researchers. Research PIs agreed more that RDM was important to scientific reproducibility, were more aware of proper RDM, had higher RDM strength in their laboratories and were more compliant with the DMP. Both research PIs and researchers believed data auditing helped them to be more compliant with data deposition in the repository. However, data auditing had no significant impact on laboratories’ data deposition rates over time, which could be due to the short sampling period. CONCLUSIONS: Research PIs and researchers generally felt that data auditing was effective in improving RDM practices. It helped to evaluate their RDM practices objectively, propose corrective actions for RDM lapses and spread awareness of the university’s data management policies. Our findings corroborated other studies in medical research, geosciences, engineering and ethics that data auditing promotes good RDM practices. Hence, we recommend research institutions worldwide to adopt data auditing as a tool to reinforce research integrity. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12910-021-00662-y.