Why ETHICS of Research

Dr. R. Lekshmi
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy
University of Kerala
The Why of Research

The Why of Research

1. For educational purpose
2. Contribution to the field of knowledge
3. For the good of the society
Involves the life situations of the human and other living beings
Involves relationships- ethics makes its way
The responsibility to behave ethically
The Context of Research Ethics

 Biomedical research ethics- a response to the abusive actions against the

research subjects in the past
 Eg. Nazi concentration camps
 The selection of research subjects – prisoners, orphans, mentally ill persons
 Even without the knowledge of the subjects
 Under the pretext that research is for knowledge explosion
 The Nuremberg code in 1948- the beginning of research ethics
 The declaration of Helsinki in 1964
 Ethical responsibilities in reporting, publication etc. across various disciplines
Research subject or participant

 Whether people involved in research are subjects or participants- a

philosophical issue ?
 In 1999, PROF. Boynton suggested – ‘ subjects’ should be banned from
research on humans and ‘ participants’ be used
 Subject – implications of subservience, involves a power structure
 Participants- Agree to take part in studies, who therefore are to be treated
with the highest standards of consideration and respect
Ethics

 Ethics- Standards of conduct that prescribe behaviour

 Morality – Right and wrong, virtue and vice etc.
 Ethics – Focusses on a social system in which the morals are applied.
 Internally defined and adopted- a codified set of rules which are explicitly
adopted by a group of people.
Why ethics when laws/ rules exist

 There is no dearth for any rules or regulations.

 Ethics goes beyond laws.

 Can everything be imposed or do we need to inculcate values internally as a
human being – a responsible behavior ?
 Is there a rationale for ethics or research ethics
The Challenge of Ethics

 How to reiterate between the different dispositions and to drive rational,

coherent and consistent codes of behavior
 Gaylord Simpson suggests three conditions about one’s actions being ethical .
 They are; 1. there are alternative courses of action 2. one is capable of
judging the actions in ethical terms and 3. one is free to choose what is
considered to be ethically right
The Ethical Principles

 Autonomy- Self- rule

respecting people as equal persons with their own choices and values
An expression of rights
 Beneficence
 Non-maleficence
To balance doing good against a risk of doing harm
Risk assessment, cost benefit analysis
 Justice
Give every person equal and fair opportunities in life
Fair practices in research and publication
The ICMR Ethical Guidelines

 Principle of essentiality – the use of human participants is considered to be

highly essential
 Principle of voluntariness- informed consent
 Principle of non-exploitation – research participants are equitably selected
 Principle of social responsibility- In no way affect social harmony in
community relationships
 Privacy and confidentiality – confidentiality and privacy of the participants be
respected
 Principle of risk minimization –Ensure that the Risks involved are least
 Principle of professional competence- Trained and competent persons to
conduct the research
contd

 Principle of maximization of benefit –Maximize the benefits to the research

participants or the society
 Principle of institutional arrangements- ensure adequate facilities in the
research centres
 Principle of transparency and accountability- Fair reporting and publication
Stakeholders should report the conflict of interest, if any
 Principle of totality of responsibility- All stakeholders involved in research
to be responsible for their actions
 Principle of environmental Protection – Accountable for the protection of
environment and resources
The Ethical Matrix

 The three principles involved in ethical research which are called the
framework of ethical matrix include
 1. respect for well being 2. respect for autonomy 3. respect for fairness
The balancing of principles, self-love( related to autonomy), love of
others(justice) and loving life( bring good and no harm) can provide us the key to
behave ethically
Ethical Principles to be Practiced while
Doing Research
 Honesty – Researcher should be objective, unbiased and truthful.
Fabrication – cook up data ; falsification- alter data or misrepresent data;
Obfuscation- patching up data from different sources.
The Sokal affair – Alan Sokal in 1996 published an article, Transgressing the
Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity in Social
Text
 Carefulness –Avoid human errors, biases and conflict of interests
 Openness- Sharing of data, results, methods, ideas, techniques and tools
 Freedom- Creativity originates from the freedom of thought and expression
 Social Responsibility- Value of research lies in what good one can bring to the
society . Withholding data/ denying access to information is unfair
Authorship/ Credit

 Credit – To all the participants of the research

 Who is an author? Is research a linear process?
 Unnecessary sensationalisation
 Bibliometric inflation
 Redundant publication
 Personation/ Ghost Writing
 Impeding the work of others
Violation of IPR

 Plagiarism
Presenting someone’s else ideas as one’s own with or without their consent by
incorporating it into your work without proper acknowledgement.
Plagiarism checkers scan for similarities between your text and the existing texts.
 Direct plagiarism- word by word copying , without quotation marks, disguise
paraphrasing, inaccurate citation etc.
 Auto plagiarism- when an author reuses significant portions of one’s previous
work without attribution
 Paraphrasing plagiarism- Using someone else’s writing with minor changes
 Mosaic plagiarism- patchwork plagiarism
 Accidental plagiarism – unintentional paraphrasing
Contd.

 Interlingual plagiarism – it is translational plagiarism

 Filling the thesis with citations and quotes to solve the problem?

 To be an ethical researcher one has to go

beyond the plagiarism checkers
The Ethical codes and the Practice

 The Need of Logical Coherence between the Problem stated, Hypothesis and
the Conclusion arrived
 Original and substantial contribution to the world of knowledge and society
 Ethical writing – a responsibility
 In every decision that we make in research and writing there ought to be
ethics
 Ethical writing – reveals authorial power and the experience to wield that
power
 But power brings responsibility
How to tell the story of your thesis

 “ There is a craft in writing a thesis, a golden thread, but you have to not let
it get too far away and become a fairy tale. Your storytelling, you could end
up writing a myth based on what you think, because you have got an idea in
mind that you want to arrive at, not a conclusion, but you have got to keep
reminding, going back, not overlooking things.”
( Kara, Helen 123)
Publication Ethics

Misconduct in publication procedures

Issues involved in Open Access Journals
Quality Journal Finders
Indexed Journals and Databases
Additions

 Redundant publications
 Salami slicing – splitting of data derived from a single research process into
multiple smaller bits or publishable units or slices.
In military parlance, it is a strategy of divide and conquer process to acquire new
territories.
Standard setting initiatives in
Publication
 The Committee on Publication Ethics ( COPE)
 The Directory of Open Access Journals( DOAJ)
 The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association ( OASPA)
 The World Association of Medical Editors( WAME)
Scholarly or standard setting organizations in publication
Conflict of Interest

 Anything that interferes with or could reasonably e perceived as interfering

with the full and objective presentation, commissioning, peer review,
editorial decision making or publication
 Circumstances in which professional judgments or actions regarding a primary
interest maybe at risk of being influenced by a secondary interest.
Predatory Journals

 Pseudo journals or fraudulent, deceptive journals

 Publications or journals that claim to be highly legitimate, qualitative but
misrepresent their publishing practices.
Open Access Publishing

 Have more visibility

 But predatory publishers take advantage of OA journals.
 They charge fee from the authors but fail to do review, editorial, proof
reading etc.
 SHERPA/ RoMEO
Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access ( SHERPA) is
an endeavor to support the establishment of a number of open access
institutional repositories
SHERPA/RoMEO is a service run by SHERPA to show the copyright and open access
self servicing policies of academic journals. RoMEO is an acronym for Rights
Metadata for Open archiving
SPPU in identifying a predatory journal

 Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU) appointed a committe to study the

issues relating to predatory journals.
 In June 2021 they have developed software tools to identify predatory
publications.
Journal Finder Tools

 Journal/ Author Name Estimator (JANE) – a free online bibliographic journal

selection ttol. JANE’s indexing criteria include journals from Pub
Med/MEDLINE indexed journals.

 Elsevier Journal finder – A freely available online service that helps to find
journals that could be best suited for publishing science papers.
 Elsevier is a leading publisher of some of the most reputed science journals
in the world.
 Springer Journal Suggester helps to find a list of journals most suited for
research and publishing papers. A leading collection of papers in
multidisciplinary research
Plagiarism Checking Tools

 Turnitin – a plagiarism detection service run by the American company,

Turnitin.
 Urkund – a completely automated system against plagiarism . Available in
almost every university in India. Chosen by MHRD, UGC INFLIBNET etc.
Databases and Research Matrices

 Database- a searcheable collection of information. In a research database you

can find thousands of articles published in different journals.
 Research Matrices – Measures used to quantify the impact of scholarly
research
databases

 Indexation of a journal is considered a reflection of the quality of the journal.

 Web of science is perhaps the most trusted citation database.
 Scopus is Elsevier’s citation database launched in 2004 to index only high
impact research journals.
Research Matrices

 Impact factor – a sciento metric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the
yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a
given journal as indexed by Clarivate’s web of science .
 SNIP ( Source Normalized Impact per Paper) – a spohisticated metric that
intrinsically accounts for field- specific differences in citation process.
 SJR ( Scimago Journal Rank) is ameasure of the impact of journals that accounts
for both the number of citations received by a journal and the importance of the
journal where the citations come from Q 1, a first quartile journal has an SJR in
the top 25% of journals for at least one of its classified disciplines.
 IPP (Impact Per Publication) is calculated as the number of citations given in the
present year to publications in the past three years divided by the total number
of publications in the past three years.
P-C matrices

 Publication-citation matrices are the handy tools for explaining the notions
used in citation analyses.
 h-index – a matric for evaluating the cumulative impact of an author’s
scholarly output and performance. The h index is a numbercalculated by
counting the number of publications for which an author has at least that
same number of times. For eg. H idex 10 means that the author has published
at least 10 papers that have each been cited at least 10 times.
 g-index- gives more weight to highly cited articles. It is the unique largest
number such that the top g articles received at least g2 citations. A g- index
of 10 indicates that the top 10 publications of the author has been cited 100
times.
P-C matrix

 i-10 index- the author level matrix which helps to measure the efficiency of
the author. It is the number of publications with at least 10 citations. This
measure is only used by the Google scholar. If one has 8 papers published and
out of which only 5 papers have 10 or more citations, then the i-10 index is 5.
 Altmetrics – proposed in 2010, coined by Jason Priem, a generalization for
article level matrics. A non traditional bibliomatrics.. It stands for alternative
metrics. It helps to monitor the reach and impact of scholarship and research.
The alternative part includes academic success such as citation counts,
impact factor, h-index etc.
THANK YOU