University of Duhok Course Name: Research Methodology

College of Engineering Course Code:

Civil, Water Resources, Architectural & Lecturer: Dr. Yaman S. S. Al-Kamaki
Electrical and computer Engineering 2020-2021
Departments
First Semester Research Methodology

Chapter 2: Ethical Issues in Research:

2.1 Ethics:

Ethics is a system of moral principles by which human actions and proposals may be judged

good or bad, right or wrong. (Macquarie Dictionary 3rd edn).

Research ethics concerns the responsibility of researchers to be honest and respectful to all

individuals who are affected by their research studies or their reports of the studies’ results.

Unethical Examples:

➢ Breaking and re-breaking of bones (to see how many times they could be broken before

healing failed to occur) Nazi

➢ Patients had been injected with live cancer cells (Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital, NY,

1963)

Source Google

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Chapter 2: Ethical Issues in Research:

2.2 Why should there be research ethics?

▪ To protect participants /patients /society /resources /researcher?

▪ To ensure accuracy of scientific knowledge

▪ To protect intellectual and property rights

2.3 Research Misconduct:

Research misconduct refers to three practices

1) Fabrication means making up data or results and recording or reporting them.

(2) Falsification means manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes, or changing

or omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the

research record.

(3) Plagiarism means the annexation of another person’s ideas, processes, results or words

without giving appropriate credit.

Source: Google

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Dr. Yaman S. S. Al-Kamaki, PhD in Structural Engineering, Melbourne, Australia
Chapter 2: Ethical Issues in Research:

2.2.1 Scientific misconduct

➢ Fraud: invention/fabrication of data

➢ Plagiarism: copying data, ideas, text without acknowledgement of source

➢ Piracy: infringement of a copyright

➢ Submitting/Publishing the same paper to different journals

▪ Not informing a collaborator of your intent to file a patent in order to make sure that you

are the sole inventor

▪ Including a colleague as an author on a paper in return for a favor even though the

colleague did not make a serious contribution to the paper

▪ Trimming outliers from a data set without discussing your reasons in paper

▪ Using an inappropriate statistical technique in order to enhance the significance of your

research

▪ Bypassing the peer review process and announcing your results through a press

conference without giving peers adequate information to review your work

▪ Conducting a review of the literature that fails to acknowledge contributions of others

▪ Stretching the truth on a grant application in order to convince reviewers that your project

will make a significant contribution to the field

▪ Giving the same research project to two graduate students in order to see who can do it

the fastest

▪ Overworking, neglecting, or exploiting research students

▪ Making derogatory comments and personal attacks in your review of author's submission

▪ Making significant deviations from the research protocol approved by the Review Board

without informing the committee

▪ Not reporting an adverse event in a human research experiment

▪ Wasting animals in research

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Dr. Yaman S. S. Al-Kamaki, PhD in Structural Engineering, Melbourne, Australia
Chapter 2: Ethical Issues in Research:

▪ Exposing students and staff to biological risks

▪ Rejecting a manuscript for publication without even reading it

2.4 American Psychological Association (APA) Guide:

➢ The researcher is obligated to protect participants from physical or psychological harm.

➢ During or after a study, participants may feel increased anxiety, anger, lower self- esteem,

or mild depression, especially in situations in which they feel they have been cheated,

tricked, deceived, or insulted.

➢ The general concept of informed consent is that human participants should be given

complete information about the research and their roles in it before agreeing to

participate.

2.5 Ethical Concerns to the Research Community:

1. The relationship between society and science.

➢ Many research ideas come from areas considered important in society.

➢ The federal government and other funding agencies use grants to affect the areas

researchers choose to examine.

2. Professional issues.

➢ The primary ethical concern here is fraudulent activity by scientists. Cheating or lying are

never defensible.

➢ Two related issues are partial publication (publishing several articles from the data

collected in one large study) and duplicate publication (publishing the same results in

more than one publication).

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Dr. Yaman S. S. Al-Kamaki, PhD in Structural Engineering, Melbourne, Australia
Chapter 2: Ethical Issues in Research:

➢ Partial publication is usually not unethical for large research studies where partial

reports of data are likely.

➢ Duplicate publication is sometimes acceptable when the results are being reported to

different audiences in publications tailored to those particular audiences.

3. Treatment of research participants.

➢ This is probably the most fundamental ethical issue.

➢ It involves ensuring that research participants are not harmed physically or

psychologically.

2.6 Ethical Issues and Scientific Integrity:

2.6.1 Reporting of Research
a. Researchers do not fabricate data. (They do not make false, deceptive, or fraudulent
statements concerning their publications or research findings.)
b. If they discover significant errors in their published data, they take reasonable steps to
correct such errors in a correction, re-traction, erratum, or other appropriate publication
means.
c. They do not present portions of another’s work or data as their own, even if the other
work or data source is cited occasionally.

2.6.2 Error and Fraud

a. It is important to distinguish between error and fraud.

b. Fraud, is an explicit effort to falsify or misrepresent data.

Watch the video : Fredric Mishkin a full professor at Columbia Business School.

2.6.3 Safeguards Against Fraud

a. A safeguard against fraud is peer review, which takes place when a researcher submits a

research article for publication.

b. Replication is repetition of a research study using the same basic procedures used in the

original to test the accuracy.

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Dr. Yaman S. S. Al-Kamaki, PhD in Structural Engineering, Melbourne, Australia
Chapter 2: Ethical Issues in Research:

2.6.4 Plagiarism

You can literally copy an entire paper word for word and present it as your own work or you

can copy and paste passages from articles and sites found on the Internet.

Source: Google

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Dr. Yaman S. S. Al-Kamaki, PhD in Structural Engineering, Melbourne, Australia
Chapter 2: Ethical Issues in Research:

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Dr. Yaman S. S. Al-Kamaki, PhD in Structural Engineering, Melbourne, Australia