Policies
The Center for Collaboration on Research Design and Analysis is located in the UNMC College of Public Health which occupies approximately 3500 square feet of office space in the building. All offices are provided with telephone and computer with high speed network outlets along with wireless technology. High capacity copier and fax hardware are readily available in the college/departments with ID badge access for UNMC faculty, student, and staff. Outside of normal business hours (8 a.m. to 5 p.m.), only individuals with appropriate electronicand hardware keys can gain entry, and each entries are logged. During normal business hours, office staff monitor entries into the offices.
Acknowledgement Statement
The Center for Collaboration on Research Design and Analysis follows the policy for authorship set forth by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and also recommended in published guidelines (Parker RA, Berman NG: Criteria for authorship for statisticians in medical papers. Statistics in Medicine 17: 2289-2299 (1998). Center for Collaboration on Research Design and Analysis members should be included as coauthors, and not be listed under acknowledgments if any of the listed criteria have been met.
Data Security and Access Plan
The College of Public Health Information Technology and UNMC Information Technology Services provide enterpriser level hardware, and software to meet all the Department’s computing needs (including database, software application) without having to employ outside resources.
Networked microcomputers are used for all departmental computing activities. These include data entry, database management, data analysis, word processing, presentation development, geographic information system applications, and other office practice activities. In addition to Microsoft office 365 application software, and a wide variety of analytic software is employed by department personnel, including R, SAS, SPSS, PASS, STATA, SPlus, Nvivo, Gauss, LimDep, SUDAAN, and ArcView. Finally, a variety of notebook computers are owned by the department and provided for faculty/staff use as a loaner device for various projects.
Rigor and Reproducibility Statement
The Center for Collaboration on Research Design and Analysis works to ensure scientific rigor for each study. Investigators meet with Center for Collaboration on Research Design and Analysis members to discuss sample size, estimate study accrual and feasibility, experimental conditions, use of technical and biological replicates, endpoint(s) and variables, need of randomization and blinding, length of follow-up, timing of planned animal sacrifices (if appropriate), hypotheses to be tested and appropriate statistical methods or tests to address hypotheses that are specific to each grant project and investigator.
The data analyses will be conducted following the pre-developed protocol and data analyses plan. Any adjustment to the statistical analysis plan after data has been collected will be carefully justified, and detailed discussion about discrepancies between the original plan and the conducted data analyses will be included in the study report.