All new members of the GSHS undertake to adhere to the standards of good research practice.
What does this entail for young researchers?
As the German Research Foundation states in its Guidelines for Safeguarding Good Research Practice academic integrity is about more than just the avoidance of academic misconduct. It is an ethical requirement of strict honesty in relation to one’s own research work, to how one deals with the ideas and findings of others, and an obligation to comply with rigorous academic and ethical standards in fields such as data collection and experimentation. Above all, it is about integrity and commitment to the values of academic social responsibility.
The initial stages in particular bring the challenge of managing a large-scale project involving extensive amounts of original findings and evaluations as well as the intellectual property of others (when making use of academic literature for example), all of which must be reliably gathered, documented and processed.
Questions of academic integrity also arise when it comes to cooperation with other researchers (in research projects or publications for example).
Therefore, in addition to the subject- and method-specific opportunities offered in the individual departments, working groups and postgraduate programmes, the Johannes Gutenberg University also provides a range of resources on good research practice and the prevention of misconduct as part of its Academic Integrity (in German) project. This includes advisory services and toolboxes for students and teachers as well as workshops (in cooperation with Mainz University Library (in German), the General Postgraduate Program, and the Writing Center).
For information, events, and advice on handling, storing, publishing and re-use of research data, please contact the Team of Experts Research Data.
The German Research Foundation’s Code on Safeguarding Good Research Practice can be found here.
The relevant legal regulations of the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz on safeguarding good research practice, and on the procedure to be adopted in cases of suspected misconduct as well as the contact details for the ombudsperson for good research practice can be found here (in German).