Good practice

Good Clinical Practice (GCP) is an international standard describing best practice and ethical standards in clinical research. Though it is mainly applicable to trials, aspects of it may be useful for our group too, for instance:

• Detailed documentation of protocol(s),
• Record keeping,
• Data storage and security.

Free GCP training is available online from NIHR at https://www.nihr.ac.uk/health-and-care-professionals/learning-and-support/good-clinical-practice.htm.

Free ICH GCP training offered by Global Health Training Centre at https://globalhealthtrainingcentre.tghn.org/ich-good-clinical-practice/.

Best practices for scientific computing is a useful overview of good computing practices. Amongst the most important of these is to use a version control system like Git for recording changes to code, and to make small changes between commits to the version control system.

This article includes some useful advice about good research practices. Particularly important aspects, which may be relevant to our group include:

• Pre-registration of protocols, including statistical analysis plans
• Make your research open - post code to GitHub, share data in public repositories, and post work to pre-print servers. Where possible, you may prefer to publish work in open access journals, and this may be a requirement for some grants