Resource Roundup: Ethics
Keeping up with current research and publication ethics is essential to good study conduct as well as ensuring your article gets published – and stays published. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to wade through all the information necessary to keep up on current best practices. Here, we’ve provided some top resources that can help you learn the details you need to know.
Experiments on Human Subjects
Experiments on human subjects and animals should follow the ethical standards set out in the Helsinki Declaration of 1975 (revised by the World Medical Association in Edinburgh in 2000), which led to the establishment of ethics committees. These guidelines ensure the welfare of the animals or human subjects involved in research and require that human subjects provide informed consent for any experiments.
Informed Consent: What Is It & How Do You Get It?
When conducting any kind of research involving human subjects, it’s important to get what is known as ‘informed consent’ from them before they participate in the study. But what exactly does ‘informed’ really translate to? Essentially, you need to ensure that all of the important details about participation and what will be done with the data collected are explained to the patient before they start the study. This can be as simple as providing them with a verbal explanation and a signature form, but normally a more detailed form is preferred.
Multiple Submissions: What are they and why are they wrong?
We know the submission process is long. Although there are several things you can do to speed up the process, one thing that many authors consider, but that should never be done, is to submit your paper to more than one journal at a time. The publishing industry refers to this practice as ‘multiple submissions.’
Figures: Permissions and Acceptable Reuse
Preparing a good manuscript involves more than just writing up your results. You also need to consider what information to present as figures or tables, and the most effective way to present them. Occasionally, particularly when writing reviews or follow-up studies to your previous work, this may mean that you want to use a figure or table from another previously published source. In these cases, there are some important considerations to keep in mind.
Understanding Copyright
When it comes to content duplication in publishing, everyone knows about plagiarism.But did you know that plagiarism is also a copyright issue and not just an ethical one? Plagiarism and copyright are often discussed separately, but because they are actually interrelated, this can be quite confusing for authors. Let’s take a look at the basics of copyright in publishing and where overlap with plagiarism comes in.
Declaring Conflicts of Interest
There are a lot of ethical considerations that all researchers need to consider when both conducting their studies and writing them up. One issue that journals are starting to take very seriously and incorporate into their guidelines is the declaration of potential conflicts of interest.
