New revamped compliance summary coming soon!

The College Summary will include RCR In-Person training as well as the online RCR training.

Scientific sleuths spot dishonest ChatGPT use in papers

Manuscripts that don't disclose AI assistance are slipping past peer reviewers.

September 8, 2023

Nature

Gemma Conroy

"On 9 August, the journal Physica Scripta published a paper that aimed to uncover new solutions to a complex mathematical equation1. It seemed genuine, but scientific sleuth Guillaume Cabanac spotted an odd phrase on the manuscript’s third page: ‘Regenerate response’.

The phrase was the label of a button on ChatGPT, the free-to-use AI chatbot that generates fluent text when users prompt it with a question. Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse in France, promptly posted a screenshot of the page in question on PubPeer — a website where scientists discuss published research."

How early-career researchers can learn to trust negative data: five simple steps

It took PhD student Jelle van der Hilst some time to realize that getting data is easy; working out whether they're useful is harder.

September 11, 2023

Nature

Jelle van der Hilst

"When I decided to pursue a PhD five years ago, I was ready to face the challenges of finding the right laboratory, securing funding and designing the perfect project. I knew the analysis and interpretation of results would produce hard questions and sleepless nights, and I dutifully reserved some mental capacity for worrying about the eventual task of thesis writing. Once I’d joined a lab in the bioengineering department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, where I study the self-assembling proteins that form powerful lenses in the eyes of squid, I quickly realized that getting data would be much less challenging than interpreting them — or trusting them."