Course Code: RS 8005 Course Name: Research and Publication Ethics Credit: 2
Course Objective
To understand the basics of ethics, research ethics, and publication ethics, and get acquainted
with tools to aid ethical research and publication practices.
Pedagogy
Lectures, Group Discussion, and Group Projects
Syllabus
Fundamentals of Ethics (6 hours)
Philosophical basis of ethics; Evolution of ethical thoughts: Oriental, Greek, Christian, and
European bases of philosophy and ethics; Ethics, Morality, and Law; Ethical Code of Conduct.
Categories of theories of ethics: Meta-ethics, Normative ethics, and Applied ethics;
Normative theories: Utilitarian, Deontological, Rights, Justice, and Virtue theories; Feminist
ethics;
Applied Ethics: Professional ethics and Research ethics;
Research Ethics
A. The Basics (5 hours)
Research misconduct: Fabrication, Falsification, and Piracy and Plagiarism; Questionable
Research Practices: Distortion, Bias, Breach of Confidentiality, and Interference; Honest
Mistakes and Negligence.
Cases of historically significant unethical research practices;
Development of research ethics code: Nuremberg Code, Belmont Report, Common Rule by
the US Institutional Review Board.
Research Ethics Code of Conduct: Research integrity and its connotations, Overarching
principles of ethical code of research, Researcher-Supervisor and Supervisor-Supervisor
Relationships, Responsibilities of Research Administrative Bodies
B. Subject- and Discipline-specific Research Ethical Issues (15 hours)
Ethical Issues in the Use of Human Participants and Animal Subjects, Physical and Social
Experiments and Survey, Computer, Internet and Social Media, Big Data, Research Methods,
and Other research ethical Issues in the disciplines of Science, Engineering, Social Sciences,
and humanities; Cases of research misconduct and lessons learnt.
Ethical guidelines specified by different professional Associations and Committees.
Dual Use Research and Role of Researcher in Society.
Publication Ethics (10 hours)
Inappropriate Authorship: Guest authors, Ghost authors, Gift authors, Authors listed without
their consent, Group authors, Anonymous authors, Deceased authors, Authorship and
Contributorship Model; Citation-related misconduct and reviewer-related misconduct;
Misconduct related to digital images; Conflicts of interest, Commitments, and Values;
Predatory journals and their characteristics, Software tools to identify them, Standards
setting initiatives and guidelines by COPE, CSE, and other Associations and Committees,
Publication Manuals, Identification of publication misconduct, Retraction of papers, Complaints
and appeals.
Plagiarism: Why authors resort to plagiarism, Detection of plagiarism, Types of text
plagiarism, Source code plagiarism, Salami publishing and Self-plagiarism, Prevention of
plagiarism, UGC Regulations for Preventing Plagiarism in Higher Education Institutes, Role of
International Researcher’s Registry System to prevent plagiarism, Similarity detection
software packages and How they work.
Ethics of open access publishing.
References
Agnes G., A. D. Moher, K. D. Cobey, and 32 others (2019), Predatory Journals: No Definition,
No Defence, Nature, Vol. 576, pp. 210 – 212, 11 December 2019.
Beall, J. (2012). Predatory Publishers Are Corrupting Open Access, Nature, 489 (7415),
[Link]/10.1038/489179a
Chowdhury H. A. and D K. Bhattacharyya (2016), Plagiarism: Taxonomy, Tools and Detection
Techniques. In Proceedings of the 19th National Convention on Knowledge, Library and
Information Networking (NACLIN’16) held at Tezpur University, Tezpur, India during
October 26–28, 2016. [Link]/publication/322634173
COPE (2018).What to Do If You Suspect Systematic Manipulation of the Publication Process,
[Link], Version 1, November 2018, Springer Nature.
Johnson, D. G. (2001), Computer Ethics, Pearson Education Asia, Third Edition,
Kornfeld, D.S. (2012).Perspective: Research Misconduct: The Search for a Remedy, Academic
Medicine, 87 (7), 1–5.
MacIntyre, A. (1966), A Short History of Ethics: A History of Moral Philosophy from the
Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century. Routledge, London.
Muralidhar, K., A. Ghosh and A. K. Singhvi (Eds.) (2019), Ethics in Science Education,
Research and Governance, Indian National Science Academy (INSA), ISBN:
978-81-939482-1-7. [Link]
National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and Institute of Medicine of the
National Academies (2009), On Being a Scientist: A Guide to Responsible Conduct in Research
(3rd ed.), National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., [Link].
Ron Iphofen (Ed.) (2020).Handbook of Research Ethics and Scientific Integrity, Springer
International Publishing, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
Singer, P. Ethics, Encyclopedia Britannica, [Link]/topic/ethics-philosophy