RDBG - Guidelines and Recommendations

Reply to Service Request: Once a request for service is submitted, please allow for up to three business days for a reply. Appointments are typically scheduled within a week, but during periods of high demand, it may take longer to get an appointment.

Initial Consultations: Initial consultations are intended to enable the RDBG to assess your needs and to provide a basic level of consultation to facilitate more extensive ongoing support, if necessary.

Turnaround and Timelines: While the RDBG always strives to accommodate deadlines, it generally takes weeks to months to conduct most analyses or to provide thorough grant preparation assistance. As the deadline approaches, our ability to provide substantial support diminishes. Please contact us early!

To receive the most comprehensive assistance that can be provided, please contact the RDBG as soon as possible. Some general recommendations include:

Work Expectations: As RDBG staff varies in background, if your study requires particular skills, we will try to find an appropriate person to fulfill that need. Thus, initial consultations are intended to enable the RDBG to assess your needs and to provide a basic level of consultation to facilitate more extensive ongoing support.

Projects run most smoothly when there are frequent, clear, and focused communications with a strong commitment from all persons involved. With the goal to enhance science, our hope is that successful consultations will turn into collaborative relationships where RDBG members are an integral part of the research team. Long-term collaboration with the RDBG is encouraged.

Pre-Award Consultations with RDBG: Some recommendations to enhance the initial pre-award consultation with the RDBG include:

Identify a few plausible statistical endpoint(s).
Identify a plausible, clinically relevant therapeutic effect that you want to be able to detect.
Locate previous studies that report the same endpoint(s) in a similar clinical setting.
Identify estimates of the variability of the endpoint(s) in the population to be studied.
Estimate the number of patients that may be available to consent and accrue and the maximum sample size you could manage.

Review of Manuscripts Prior to Submission: It is highly recommended that RDBG staff review papers submitted for publication. Review includes checking tables and other numbers in the text for errors, as well as assessing the methods and results sections for accuracy and appropriateness.

Policy on authorship: All RDBG staff members who contribute substantially to a manuscript are expected to qualify for authorship with the following guidelines in mind. These guidelines are from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors:

"Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content. Authorship credit should be based only on substantial contributions to each of the following areas: (1) conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; and (2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and (3) final approval of the version to be published. Conditions 1, 2, and 3 must all be met."

Authorship should not be dictated strictly by the time spent on a project; the quantity of time and nature of the contribution are relevant. Given the above justifications, it is expected that RDBG staff be considered for authorship. Appropriate credit for the contributions of other individuals to the work described in the publication should be made as an acknowledgment.

NIH Acknowledgement: Investigators who receive any support from any ICTS resource, including the RDBG, should cite the Washington University ICTS/CTSA grant in all publications and projects. For details please click here.