Research

• Research is curiosity driven pursuit of the unknown

• Research involves systematic and creative investigations in any domain of knowledge
• Research follows systematic and rational methodologies, which involve defining the question
(based on what is presently known), hypothesizing, making unbiased observations, analysing the
observations, and finally interpreting the results to support or reject the hypothesis.
• Research has owner/s who actually find something new, and recipients, who learn about the new
discovery when the owner communicates the new information/knowledge to the larger group

Publicly funded research

• Organized research has always been supported by society in one form or the other
• With the widespread establishment of universities and other academic/research institutions
across the globe during the past few centuries, research activity has transformed to a largely
state-driven and state-regulated activity
• As the research efforts in science become more dependent upon rapidly advancing
technologies, the cost of research has also gone up substantially in recent times
• This has made most research, especially in the sciences, to be majorly supported by public
funds routed through governmental agencies and to a lesser extent by individuals or private
organizations
Ethics in Research
• All research studies rely on the available base knowledge or as known to the
investigator at the given time
• As the knowledge base expands, it is more likely that something that was
accepted as fact at a given point of time, needs modification or even rejection
• When some established ideas/interpretations are shown to be wanting in some
respects by subsequent studies that a perceptible quantum progress in our
knowledge and understanding of nature becomes evident

Ethics in Research
• Ethics are the standards or the norms of behaviour which guide the moral choices about
relationships and behaviour concerning others
• Ethics in research aims to ensure that nobody is suffering or harmed from the research
activity and its consequences
• Research ethics controls the codes of behaviour for research scientists
• It acts as a reference for conducting research responsibly.
PRINCIPLES OF RESEARCH ETHICS
Reasons for unethical conduct
• Competition & Claiming Priority
• Publications and/or patents, has now become the standard measure for comparison between
academic researchers
• Appointment for a position, promotion, getting an award
• Commercial interests leads to misleading or unsubstantiated claims to compete and garner greater
share of the market
• The increasingly stiff competition places unrealistic demands on “winning the race”
• Multiple individuals/groups working on similar topics results in intense competition which may
prompt some to find unethical shortcuts to stake the claim ahead of others
• Ranking
• Ranking of research covers a wide canvas extending from individual researchers to journals and
institutions at national and international levels
• Ranking is associated with prestige and funding that can be provided for research
• With resources being limited, the race to win a higher ranking is becoming more intense and global,
bringing in its wake a loss of academic and research integrity

• Prestige associated with journal impact factor

• Journal impact factor (JIF) has gained prominence in assessing the quality of research output of
individuals as well as institutions
• The undue importance given to the numerical value of impact factor has generated a race between
journals to achieve annually increasing impact factors
• Researchers are made to aspire to publish their findings in journals with higher JIF since that is
considered to provide a stamp of ‘quality’ and has become the most important bibliometric indicator of
‘quality’
• Poor infrastructure for research in universities and colleges
• Universities and colleges, as institutions of higher education, have the dual responsibility
of disseminating knowledge to the learners and of creating new knowledge through
research
• The latter activity is especially more relevant for university faculty
• Creative and original research needs an appropriate and “conducive environment”, and
adequate infrastructure
• Unfortunately, most universities and colleges have neither the “conducive environment”
nor the minimally-needed infrastructure
• Emphasis on quantity rather than quality
• The increasingly competitive organized research demands relative evaluation of research
output of individuals and academic institutions for recognition, rewards, funding, and so on
• Publish or perish syndrome
• With institutional requirements of certain minimal number of research publications for
eligibility and calculation of the academic performance index (API), the rush for research
publications has become more demanding
What constitutes unethical behaviour?
• Fabrication, Falsification & Plagiarism (FFP)
• Three ethical issues characterized as research misconduct
• Fabrication is making up data or results and recording or reporting them
• Falsification is manipulating research materials/equipment/processes, or changing/omitting data or results such
that the research is not accurately represented in the research record
• Plagiarism is the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate
credit
• Unlike unintentional errors or negligence, FFP involves the intent to deceive
• When researchers intentionally falsify or fabricate information, they violate fundamental scientific standards

Fabrication
• Concocting results
• Reporting observations that were never made
• Inventing something in order to deceive
• Misdemeanours that distort the research showing results that do not exist
• Example – Creating fake survey results, inventing experiment data points that were not actually observed, or "filling
in" missing data for uncompleted experiments

Falsification
• Altering information, data, document, or evidence to mislead
• Fudging of results
• Conveniently omitting unpleasant data to improve results
• Misdemeanours that distort the research by not showing results that exist but doesn’t fit in the narrative
• Examples – Altering images (e.g., in western blots or microscopy), deleting data points to support a hypothesis, or
Plagiarism
• Appropriation of another person’s:
• Ideas
• Processes
• Results
• Words
• She/he is not given appropriate credit
• Examples – Copying someone else’s text without quotation marks and citation, using someone
else’s data, or presenting someone else’s ideas as one’s own
• Most common is plagiarism of text
• Occurs during the writing up of the research report when credit is not given where it is due to the
earlier research publications
• Violates ethics during the publication process

UGC regulations for plagiarism

• India is taking strict measures to ensure that researchers are ethical in that their research
publications are free from plagiarism
• Towards this end, UGC issued a Gazette Notification on promotion of, academic integrity, on July
31, 2018.
• This states clearly in the section titled : Definitions under item “Plagiarism” means the practice of
taking someone else’s work or idea and passing them as one’s own.”
• This UGC Notification ensures the use of software that check for text similarity of submitted
manuscripts with existing literature, a practice that established journals also regularly follow
Outcome of FFP
• Erosion of Trust: Undermines the credibility of scientific research, Wastage of time for other
researchers, leading to the propagation of erroneous information
• Career Damage: Can lead to retraction of published papers, loss of funding, and destruction
of scientific reputation
• Reputational Damage: Irreparable harm to professional standing, including blacklisting within
the scientific community
• Institutional/Career Consequences: Immediate, severe, and lasting, including job loss,
suspension, or termination of employment, Damages the reputation of the university or
research institution
• Academic/Scientific Sanctions: Retraction of published papers, formal notifications to funding
agencies, and being barred from future research projects or funding opportunities
• Legal/Financial Action: Legal ramifications for fraudulent, grant-funded work, and the duty to
repay misspent funds
• Fabrication and falsification are typically considered more severe than plagiarism, as they
constitute direct fraud
 Responsibility of Co-authors

Your responsibility
Young researchers need to realize that the research community takes such unethical behaviour
very seriously
There is growing effort to impose penalties on the perpetrators, and penalties are even being
imposed ex-post-facto
The published research papers are open to scrutiny for posterity, and social media will highlight
the allegations pertaining to unethical behaviour in old, published work only when the
researchers achieve prominence later in life
Young researchers must be conscious that the existing penalties may become even more severe
as time progresses, and follow abundant caution
Ethics in research and publishing
• The Research Lifecycle: Research moves from framing questions and designing methodology to data collection,
analysis, and final publication
• Ethical Oversight: While institutional ethics committees monitor the planning and execution phases, ethical
standards are often less strictly monitored during the publication stage
• The Role of COPE: To address this "gray area," the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) established a "code of
conduct" and "best practice guidelines"
• Guidance for Editors: COPE provides essential recommendations to help journal editors identify and manage cases
of research and publication misconduct
Publication misconduct – What & Why ?
Many authors remain unaware of ethical guidelines related to publishing
Publication misconduct is of several types
It can happen incidentally or intentionally
Publish or perish
Prestige, position, financial benefits, funding, career advancements
• Dual/duplicate/redundant publications
• Where the same set of authors publishes more or less similar findings from the same study/dataset as two or more
separate papers in the same or different journals
• The results and conclusions of the publications are highly similar
• For example, a researcher submits a paper reporting the impact of add-on (drug) X therapy on hyperlipidaemia in
patients with diabetes mellitus and another paper reporting the effect of add-on (drug) X therapy on serum lipid
levels in patients on oral hypoglycaemic agents.
• If both papers are submitted at the same time to two different journals, it is considered simultaneous publications.

• Salami slicing
• Salami slicing is the most common type of redundant publication
• Salami slicing means producing multiple publications from a single study/dataset
• Here, the researcher splits the study data into the smallest possible publishable units or “slices” to increase the
volume of his/her publications, and he may or may not realize that it is unethical to do so

Authorship
• Defines the role of a creator whose intention is to circulate original ideas and intellectual works
• In scholarly publishing, in particular, the role of the author carries significant responsibility, legal rights, and
privileges
• Authorship provides credit for an individual’s contributions to a study and carries accountability
International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) Recommendations
• The ICMJE is a small group of general medical journal editors and representatives of selected related organizations working together to
improve the quality of medical science and its reporting
• ICMJE meets annually to refine its Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical
Journals.
• ICMJE developed recommendations
• To review best practice and ethical standards in the conduct and reporting of research and other material published in medical
journals
• To help authors, editors, and others involved in peer review and biomedical publishing create and distribute accurate, clear,
reproducible, unbiased medical journal articles
ICMJE – Why Authorship Matters ?
• Authorship confers credit and has important academic, social, and financial implications
• Authorship also implies responsibility and accountability for published work
• The ICMJE recommendations are intended to ensure that contributors who have made substantive intellectual contributions to a paper are
given credit as authors
ICMJE – Who is an author ?
• The ICMJE recommends that authorship be based on the following 4 criteria:
• Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work
• Drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content
• Final approval of the version to be published
• Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of
the work are appropriately investigated and resolved
ICMJE – Non-Author Contributors
• Contributors who meet fewer than all 4 of the above criteria for authorship should not
be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged
• Examples of activities that alone (without other contributions) do not qualify a
contributor for authorship are acquisition of funding
• General supervision of a research group or general administrative support
• Writing assistance, technical editing, language editing, and proofreading
ICMJE – Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Assisted Technology
• At submission, the journal should require authors to disclose whether they used AI-
assisted technologies (such as Large Language Models [LLMs], chatbots, or image
creators) in the production of submitted work
• Authors who use such technology should describe, in both the cover letter and the
submitted work in the appropriate section if applicable, how they used it
• If AI was used for writing assistance, describe this in the acknowledgment section
• If AI was used for data collection, analysis, or figure generation, authors should describe
this use in the methods
• Chatbots (such as ChatGPT) should not be listed as authors because they cannot be
responsible for the accuracy, integrity, and originality of the work, and these
responsibilities are required for authorship
Types of Inappropriate Authorship
• Honorary authorship
• Authorship for Sale
• Ghost Authorship

Honorary authorship
• Honorary authorship is when an individual becomes a named author even though they have not made a substantial contribution and/or met
authorship criteria
• This can also be called:
• Gift or guest authorship – naming an individual author out of respect or gratitude.
• Coercive authorship – a senior researcher forcing a junior researcher to include a gift or guest author
• A recent study of academic misconduct found 35.5% of survey respondents across all disciplines had added authors to their own manuscripts even
though those authors made minimal contributions to the project.
• This practice happens for a number of reasons:
• Junior researchers may feel pressured into accepting honorary authorship for more senior researchers in their research group in an attempt not to
offend or due to these researchers having power over their career progression.
• In some disciplines, department head or senior researchers may be added regardless of their contribution.
Authorship for Sale
• Some instances have been reported in which non-authors have attempted to buy authorship from an author of a paper, often after the paper has
been invited for revision or provisionally accepted.

Ghost Authorship
• Ghost authors participate in the research, data analysis, and/or writing of a manuscript but are not named or disclosed in the author by-line or
acknowledgments
• This could be due to:
• a professional writer employed to draft an article on behalf of a company.
• a scientist could employ a professional writer to overcome a lack of writing skills, limited time or lack of knowledge of journal requirements.
What is Conflict of Interest (CoI) ?
• A conflict of interest in research occurs when an investigator's personal or professional interests could potentially
compromise the objectivity, integrity, or conduct of their work
• It is important that we understand and identify these conflicts
• It is necessary to maintain the credibility of our scientific endeavours and public trust in our institutions
• Conflicts of interest typically fall into two main categories:
• Financial
• Non-financial

Financial conflicts
• Industry funding: A pharmaceutical company funds a drug trial, potentially biasing results
• Stock ownership: Authors owning shares in companies related to their study
• Consulting fees: Paid speaking engagements that might influence objectivity
• Patents or royalties: Owning intellectual property related to the research subject
• Dual employment: Holding positions in both academia and industry

Non-financial conflicts
• Personal relationships with research participants or stakeholders
• Professional rivalries or competitions that could influence study design or interpretation
• Ideological or religious beliefs that may affect research direction or conclusions
• Institutional affiliations or loyalties that might bias research outcomes
• Example – A sociologist with strong political beliefs might unconsciously design survey questions that lead participants
towards certain responses
Academic journals
• Researchers are engaged in discovering new knowledge and reaffirming the results of previous endeavours
• Results of these research is disseminated through academic journals
• These journals state the author’s credentials, methods of investigation, observations, and outcomes of the
research
• Process of academic publishing helps in mapping the progress of any discipline
• Academic journals were first published in 1665 in print format
• Qualities of a good journal
• Stringent editorial practices
• Strong editorial board
• Robust peer review systems
• These criteria make these journals authentic and trusted among researchers

• Print journal gradually transited to the electronic format

• This significantly impacted academic publishing by giving free online access or Open Access (OA)
• New pricing models came up without diluting standard publishing practices
• Commercial publishers started a new business model by charging extra fees
• Article Processing Charges (APCs), for allowing immediate access to the research papers
• Gold OA journals survive solely on revenue generated by APCs
Predatory publishing
• Some publishers took advantage by bringing out the “Pay and Publish” model
• Jeffery Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado in Denver, is credited as coining the term “predatory
publishers”
• He defined predatory publication as “Publish counterfeit journals to exploit the open-access model in which
the author pays. These predatory publishers are dishonest and lack transparency. They aim to dupe
researchers, especially those inexperienced in scholarly communication.”
• Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE): “Predatory publishing is generally defined as for profit open-access
journal publication of scholarly articles without the benefit of peer review by experts in the field or the usual
editorial oversight of the journals in question.”

Implications of Predatory Journals

• Corruption in Science and Other Disciplines

• These papers have not been peer-reviewed and this could lead to a real negative impact on the
credibility of science and disciplines
• Influence on Key Sectors such as Human Health
• Misleading information can influence behaviour and cause damage to human health
• Damage to the Institution’s Reputation
• Publishing in predatory journals by the researchers affiliated to the institutions causes collateral
damage to the profile of the institution
• Loss of Money – Exorbitant APCs
• Waste of Time and Efforts
What is indexing ?
 Journal indexing /bibliographic indexes/bibliographic databases
 Collections of journal titles grouped by discipline, subject, or publishing type
 Submitting your work to an indexed journal increases its authority and visibility
 Existence of a journal in well-known databases indicates journal’s reliability
 Indexed journals are of higher quality than non-indexed journals
 Indexing helps journals being accessible to a wide audience
 Being accessible in turn will improve journal’s reputation as a reliable source of high-quality information in its field

• Why Indexing is required ?

• Discoverable, Accessible & Wider audience reach

 Academic papers are only influential if they are discoverable

 Online discovery is almost entirely reliant on journal indexing
 Papers will be difficult to find if discovery tools do not correctly index them
 Database search is the first activity researchers undertake as part of their study
 They start by searching well-known databases
 Indexing will allow the journal to be discoverable by use of keywords
 Avoiding predatory journals
 Indexing determines the trustworthiness of publications
 It helps to find a good journal
 Non-indexed journals are of inferior scientific quality
 Indexing helps to detect the journals which practice unethical publication rules
 Metrics
 Journal Indexing helps track the metrics of the journal
 It helps to compare more than one journal on one particular subject

Basic indexing standards

 Journals should include the following to fulfil basic indexing requirements
o International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
o Editorial Board page with names, titles, and affiliations of the editors
o Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) – DOIs are unique letter/number codes assigned to digital
objects. The benefit of a DOI is that it will never change, unlike a website link
o A defined publication schedule
o Copyright Policy
o Metadata at the article level
• Indexing databases can be categorized by various feature

• Based on organisation type • On the Basis of Research Field

• Corporate databases • General Databases
• WoS, Scopus, Crossref, Google Scholar • WoS, Scopus, ERIH PLUS, Crossref, Google Scholar
• Non-profit databases
• SCImago, ERIH Plus, MathSciNet • Subject specific databases
• PubMed on medical research, PsycINFO on
• Selective approach psychology, ERIC on educational science,
• Selective on the basis of scientific excellence MathSciNet and ZblMATH on mathematics
• WoS, Scopus, PubMed, ERIH Plus, ERIC
• Selective on ethical standards • On the Basis of subscription
• DOAJ, Cabell • Subscription based- WoS, Scopus, MathSciNet
• All inclusive
• Crossref, Google Scholar, Research Gate • Freely available- SCImago, Google Scholar, Research
Gate, ZblMATH
Research metrics
Proliferation of data and increasing no. of journals/publications
Important to find quality markers for publications and journals
Scholars use databases to measure the quality of research journals
Also used to assess the scientific outputs of individuals and institution
Eugene Garfield (1955) published a paper in the journal Science
Where he first time advocated the necessity of introducing parameters to assess the quality of scientific journals
In 1960, he founded the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI, Philadelphia, PA, USA); subsequently he published the Genetics
Citation Index in 1963, followed by the first official launch of Science Citation Index (SCI) in 1964 (Garfield, 1979).
• Research metrics are used across the publishing industry as indicators of research performance, both at the
journal and at the author level
• Two crucial ingredients of bibliometric studies are
• Number of publications
• Number of times those publications are cited
• It is presumed that a quality paper is cited more often than an average paper
• Research metrics
• Impact Factor, h-index, Altmetrics etc.

Impact Factor (IF)/Journal Impact Factor (JIF)

• Impact Factor (IF) or the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is based on the concept of citations
• Citations are the explicit linkages between research papers that share commonality of any kind
• A citation index is built around these linkages
• It lists publications that have been cited and identifies the sources of the citations
• The impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which an “average article” in a journal has been cited in
a particular year
• The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) attempts to quantify the idea of citations so as to apply it to large
number of journals published across diverse range of disciplines
• Designed to help librarians with the collection and management of journals in the 1960s
• It has since then also become a common proxy for journal quality

• An Impact Factor of 2.0 means that, on an average, the articles published one or two year prior have
been cited twice in the current year.

• Disadvantages of impact factor

• The Impact Factor is an arithmetic mean and it doesn’t adjust for the distribution of citations
• The Impact Factor only considers the number of citations, not the nature or quality
• Impact Factors cannot be compared across different subject areas
• The JCR doesn’t distinguish between citations made to articles, reviews, or editorials
• Impact Factors can show significant variation year-on-year, especially in smaller journals
5-year Impact Factor
• Average number of times articles from a journal published in the last five years have been cited in
the JCR year (as compared to the last 2 years for IF)

The calculation of the 5-year Impact Factor includes a longer time span which allows more citation
activities
• It may be more appropriate for subject disciplines such as Arts and Humanities which take longer
time to have the citation activities

CiteScore
• Metric for measuring journal impact in Scopus
• The calculation of CiteScore for the current year is based on the number of citations received by a
journal in the latest 4 years (including the calculation year), divided by the number of documents
published in the journal in those four years.
Major difference between CiteScore and Journal Impact Factor:
• CiteScore calculation is based on Scopus data, while Impact Factor is based on Web of
Science data.
• CiteScore uses a 4-year window while Impact Factor adopts a 2-year window.
• CiteScore includes more document types indexed by Scopus, including articles, reviews,
conference papers, data papers and book chapters; while Impact Factor only includes "citable
documents" which are articles and reviews.

SJR (SCImago Journal Rank)

•It ranks publications by weighted citations per document
•It is a prestige metric based on the idea that not all citations are the same
•Citations are weighted more or weighted less – depending on the source they come from
•It calculates the prestige of a journal by considering the value of the sources that cite it, rather than counting all
citations equally

SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper)

•Measures contextual citation impact by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field
•The impact of a single citation is given higher value in subject areas where citations are less likely, and vice versa
•For example, journals in Mathematics, Engineering and Social Sciences tend to have higher values than titles in
Life Sciences.
•Allows direct comparison of sources in different subject fields.
•The differences of journals’ SNIP are due to the quality of the journals but not the different citation behavior
between subject fields.
 Author-level metrics – H index
• Author-level metrics are citation metrics that measure the bibliometric impact of individual
authors
• H-index is the best known author-level metric
• The h-index attempts to measure both the productivity and impact of the published work of
a scientist or scholar.
• The calculation was suggested by an American physicist JE Hirsch
• A scientist has an index h if h of his/her Np papers has at least h citations each, and the
other (Np-h) papers have no more than h citations each
• Number of publications does not reveal how well these articles have been received by
other researchers
• The main advantage of the h-index is that it is neither skewed upwards by a small number
of highly cited papers nor skewed downwards by a long tail of poorly-cited work

Author-level metrics – g index

The g-index is a metric used in bibliometrics to measure the productivity and citation impact of a researcher's scholarly
work
Proposed by Leo Egghe in 2006
It was designed as an improvement to the widely used h-index by giving more weight to a researcher's most highly-
cited papers
Given a set of articles ranked in decreasing order of the number of citations that they received, the G-Index is the
(unique) largest number such that the top g articles received (together) at least g 2 citations
If a researcher has a g-index of 20, it means their top 20 papers have a combined total of at least 400 citations (20 X
20)
A researcher's g-index is always greater than or equal to their h-index
Author-level metrics – i10 index

• The i10-index is a simple bibliometric measure used to gauge a researcher's productivity and impact
• It is calculated as the number of publications by a researcher that have received at least 10 citations.
• Key Details
• Introduced by: Google Scholar in July 2011.
• Availability: It is exclusive to Google Scholar and is prominently displayed on Google Scholar
Citations profiles.
• Purpose: To provide a straightforward snapshot of an author's "well-cited" work, filtering out papers
with very low or no citations
Feature i10-index h-index g-index

Calculation Count of papers with ≥ Max number h where h Max number g where
10 citations papers have ≥ h top g papers have ≥
citations g2 total citations

Complexity Very Simple Moderate High

Main Use Baseline productivity Productivity + Influence Weighting elite papers

Database Google Scholar only Google Scholar, Publish or Perish

Scopus, Web of (Google Scholar)
Science