Research integrity officials and compliance folks charged with preventing and investigating misconduct allegations and other potential improprieties in publications have a new tool they may wish to share within their institutions, and one that a coauthor told RRC will also perhaps make them a bit more discerning themselves when they read scientific publications.

Called “REAPPRAISED,” the tool is a checklist^[1] that comes courtesy of a group representing academics, investigators and journal editors who offer it to address the loss of unquestioned trust in publications. Institutions could make use of some or all of it mandatory. It can be used in the prewriting stage, perhaps assigning tasks to certain departments.

“I have seen cases recently where if someone had asked, ‘Is the volume of work plausible,’ it could have saved a lot of people heartache and headaches,” co-author C.K. Gunsalus, director of the National Center for Professional and Research Ethics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, told RRC.