Responsible Conduct
The responsible and ethical conduct of research is critical for excellence, as well as public trust, in social science, science, and engineering, and is essential to the preparation of future scientists and engineers. The University of Notre Dame is committed to creating an environment that promotes responsible conduct in research and fosters integrity within the research community.
Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) training is required for undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows who receive National Science Foundation (NSF) or National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds.
Effective July 31, 2023, Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) training is required for faculty and other senior personnel who will be supported by NSF to conduct research.
Researchers at the University of Notre Dame meet the RCR training requirements of the NSF and the NIH for training in the following ways.
CITI Training
Researchers at the University of Notre Dame must complete online training via an institutional subscription to the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI), a consortium of universities that provides convenient and comprehensive online training modules, for all faculty, graduate students, and post-doctoral scholars, related to RCR.
The CITI RCR training modules will be tailored to specific areas of research, such as humanities, engineering, physical science, social and behavioral science. The following topics are examples of the substantive content of RCR:
- Data Acquisition, Management, Sharing and Ownership
- Publication Practices and Responsible Authorship
- Peer Review
- Mentor/Mentee Responsibilities and Relationships
- Conflict of Interest
- Collaborative Research
- Research Misconduct and Policies for Handling Misconduct
- Research Study Design
- Undue Foreign Influence: Risks and Mitigations
The CITI modules provide a certification of completion when completes the course is completed and passed. Students who fail to comply with the training requirements within 60 days of award notification may be excluded from working on NSF and NIH sponsored projects.
Accessing Modules
Download our step-by-step guide to learn how to access CITI modules.
- Log-in through Notre Dame using Okta.
- Select "I don't have a CITI Program account and I need to create one." If you have a CITI account, please log-in and skip to Step 4.
- Click the blue button, "Create a New CITI Program Account."
- Under Institutional Courses heading, click the blue button, "View Courses" to the right of University Notre Dame.
- This will take you to a page that lists your active CITI courses. Scroll down the page and click "Add a Course," which is the first bullet under Learner Tools for the University of Notre Dame heading.
- Review content on the Select Curriculum page and then click the "Continue to Question 1 at this time."
- Answer the questions to enroll in appropriate courses and click the blue "Submit" button at the bottom of the page.
- This will return you the active CITI courses page. Review the options under the Courses Ready to Begin header and click the blue "Start Now" button on the course you'd like to begin.
For additional questions or more information on CITI, please visit www.citiprogram.org/. For support on the CITI training program, including registration, please visit support.citiprogram.org/.
Graduate School Training
The Graduate School at the University of Notre Dame offers a three-hour ethics workshop requirement for graduation (Ph.D. only). The sessions focus on different aspects of the responsibilities and ethics in the conduct of research, such as recognizing and approaching ethical problems, mentoring, conflicts of interest and commitment, avoiding plagiarism, intellectual property, research misconduct, human subject research, and animal research and lab safety.
Please see graduateschool.nd.edu/graduate-training/ethics/research-ethics-requirement for details.
Need More Information?
For questions on responsible conduct, please email compliance@nd.edu.