IRB Proposal Portal

All human subjects research conducted by Bucknell personnel must be approved in advance by Bucknell's Institutional Review Board. Current faculty, staff, and students may use the portal to submit, renew, and manage their IRB proposals. Further information on materials and information needed may be found below. The IRB recommends that first-time researchers review the resources on the Guidance & FAQs page.

Submit or Manage IRB Proposals

Open IRB Proposal System

Information & Materials Needed for Proposal Submission

The submission system will walk you through a number of questions about, for example, how your subjects will be recruited, what they will be told about the research, whether there are any risks or rewards involved, and so on. Your research plans should be well thought out when you submit your proposal, but you may save your proposal and come back to it later if you wish. In the last stage of the proposal, you will upload a number of documents:

  • All final copies of the materials you wish to give to your subjects (such as surveys or stimuli) and/or documents describing in more detail the nature of your interaction with them (such as a list of interview questions, outlines of topics for focus groups, and so on).
  • An informed consent form that the participants in your study will be asked to sign. There are sample informed consent forms available in the Guidance & FAQs page.
  • Evidence of training in human subjects research for each researcher on the project (for details, see the Training Requirements page). 

You may download a copy of the questions used in the online system by clicking one of the links below:

Process

Any current Bucknell faculty, staff, or student may use the submission system above to submit their project for review (students may also submit on behalf of faculty or staff principal investigators). Students will need to list a faculty or staff “sponsor” of their research; any student who lacks a sponsor should contact the IRB chair.

Based on initial responses to questions, the online proposal submission system will automatically make an assessment of the level of review required (which will be confirmed by the chair). Proposals requiring full board review will be considered at the IRB's biweekly meetings throughout the academic year; proposals classified as “exempt” or “expedited” will be reviewed on a rolling basis throughout the calendar year (usually in under a week).  

Renewals & Updates

As of January 2020, only projects requiring full board approval require annual renewal (if data-collection is continuing); approval for exempt and expedited projects does not expire. However, any substantive protocol changes require approval. For small changes (e.g., adding new researchers, changing wording on surveys / interviews, changing sampling procedures, and so on), an email to the IRB chair is usually sufficient; please cite your project’s tracking number. For more major changes and updates, investigators should use the renewal feature in the proposal system.