Rigor Champions and Opportunities

Rigorous experimental procedures and transparent reporting of research results are vital to the continued success of the biomedical enterprise at both the preclinical and the clinical levels. See below for more information on efforts to catalyze communities of champions to promote rigorous research.

Rigor Champions

As described in this publication, enthusiastic individuals ("champions") who want to drive improvements in rigorous research practices, transparent reporting, and comprehensive education may come from all career stages and sectors, including undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, researchers, educators, institutional leaders, journal editors, scientific societies, private industry, and funders. We encourage​​​​​ champions to organize themselves into communities to effect change within and across scientific institutions, for example through this recent workshop. These communities can share resources and best practices, propose changes to current training and research infrastructure, build new tools to support better research practices, and support rigorous research on a daily basis.

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#RIGORCHAMPION scientificrigor.slack.com NINDS Office of Research Quality

If you are interested in learning more about rigor champions, you can join this grassroots Slack workspace, follow us on Twitter/X, or email us at RigorChampions@nih.gov.

*New Opportunities for Rigor Champions*

Learn more from this NINDS Director's Message!

Notice of Funding Opportunity (Active):

NINDS Sustainable Transformation of Institutional Research Rigor (STIRR) Program (RC2 - Clinical Trial Not Allowed)

This funding opportunity aims to support the establishment of programs to enhance research rigor and transparency practices within academic and research institutions to promote a culture of high-quality neuroscience research. Awards are intended to support the implementation of innovative programs, strategies, and approaches at the departmental, inter-departmental, or equivalent intra-institutional entity level. 

Challenge (Closed):

NINDS Rigor Champions Prize

This Challenge seeks creative and effective approaches to changing research culture around rigorous and transparent research practices that have been tested or employed by the participant(s). These approaches can be on a small scale or a much larger one, and they can be driven by an individual or a small team. Promoting rigorous research practices and transparent reporting involves many members of the scientific community, so we encourage submissions from all rigor champions, including trainees and other early-career researchers, administrators, librarians, staff scientists, faculty, and other integral members of the scientific community from diverse disciplines and types of organizations.

Example Activity:

Rigor Icons to Maximize Transparency in Presentations

Scientific meetings are an important venue for disseminating findings, but space and time for experimental design details is often limited. Thus, to facilitate increased transparency in scientific presentations, we propose the use of rigor icons to quickly and easily convey the experimental design details. Rigor icons are simple symbols that can be added to figures to easily convey important experimental design details in scientific presentations.