Introduction

#EditorObservations 18 Understanding research ethics (YouTube, 1m 17s)

Ethics are moral principles that determine how a person behaves in a specific context. Conducting research is one such context. The ethical conduct of research is critically important to ensure that the scholarly community and the general population can trust the conclusions drawn from scholarly research. The ethical conduct of research shapes a researcher’s reputation. Engaging in research misconduct tarnishes a researcher’s reputation forever. Engaging in unethical research, therefore, is an extremely short-sighted strategy.

Many organisations have taken it upon themselves to define various aspects relating to research ethics and formulate guidelines. Unfortunately, many of those documents have become overly complicated and not user friendly. Short, succinct versions of key research ethics issues are often provided by publishers. For example, Elsevier’s ethics policy. It deals with authorship, plagiarism, data access and retention, multiple, redundant or concurrent publication, acknowledgement of sources, how to deal with fundamental errors identified after a paper has been published, reporting standards, and additional aspects relevant to specific areas of investigation.

The following subsections include #editorobservations that deal with these aspects.