Catalyst Grant rewards winners for research integrity innovation

Teams developing dashboards to flag retracted or questionable research papers have won this year’s Digital Science Catalyst Grants.

The winning applications from Digital Science’s 2024 Catalyst Grant round were:

• PostPub – led by Dr Achal Agrawal (Founder), with Dr Moumita Koley (Senior Research Analyst, DST-Center for Policy Research, and Research Fellow, RoRI, UK); and

• VIRUS (Visualization of Irregular Research Under Scrutiny) – led by Dr Lonni Besançon, with Dr Fabrice Frank.

PostPub is based in India. This team aims to address a lack of awareness of research misconduct as well as a lack of accountability for those engaged in it. PostPub, which has already established its own Retraction Dashboard, will draw on Digital Science data to extend the dashboard.

The dashboard will visualise gaps in the data-sharing practices of researchers across countries and journals, and journal response times when integrity issues are flagged, and will flag irregular activity. PostPub also aims to create a notification system to alert responsible parties about these irregularities, and to track actions taken, helping to improve accountability in research.

PostPub’s Dr Achal Agrawal said: “We are honoured to receive the Catalyst Grant from Digital Science, enabling us to take the research integrity work we have begun to the next stage of development. Through our work, we hope to incentivise researchers, universities and publishers to do the right thing and encourage greater responsibility for research integrity. In the long term, we hope our work will help in reducing research malpractices and increase transparency with respect to actions taken by various stakeholders.”

Based in Sweden, VIRUS is developing a real-time visualisation system and dashboard intended to be used by scientific “sleuths”, as well as research integrity teams from publishers, editorial teams in journals, and universities.

The system will keep records of papers that have been flagged as questionable, as well as their impact on several scholarly measures – such as citations, altmetrics, and policy attention – to better understand the potentially harmful impact these papers could have. The team aims to move away from smaller, curated subsets of papers to using much wider databases, such as Digital Science’s own Dimensions, the world’s most complete database of linked research information.

VIRUS’s Dr Lonni Besançon said: “We are both happy and honoured to receive this Catalyst Grant from Digital Science in what we hope to be a successful venture coordinated with the research and sleuthing of Forensics Scientometrics. We believe our system has a particularly important role to play in visually assessing and communicating the impact of questionable papers which are still cited or used in policy documents or clinical guidelines.

“We hope VIRUS will make it easier to prioritise investigations and editorial decisions and help provide a faster and more efficient decontamination of the scientific literature. Ultimately, we anticipate that this work will be the first of a long collaboration with Digital Science and its amazing team.”

Digital Science CEO Dr Daniel Hook said: “I congratulate our new winners of the Digital Science Catalyst Grant. Each of this year’s winners has approached a key issue of research integrity from an innovative angle, and focusing on practical solutions that have the potential to safeguard research and build people’s trust in science.

“I also want to thank Dr Leslie McIntosh, a prior Catalyst winner and VP Research Integrity at Digital Science, for working with our Catalyst team, headed by Steve Scott, to bring about this integrity-focussed Catalyst Grant.  We look forward to mentoring the successful teams to make the most of the Catalyst Grant and to take their ideas to wider audiences.”

Read our recent expert viewpoint on research integrity by Leslie McIntosh here