Ethics in scientific writing

Workshop Publikasi Ilmiah pada bidang Business, Economics, and Social Sciences
11 April 2022
Direktorat Publikasi Ilmiah dan Informasi Strategis

DIKKY INDRAWAN, PhD 2022

Assistant Director of Scientific Publication
Why researchers publish?
• Fame
• Recognition by peers
• Fortune
• Promotions
• Grant applications
• Establish precedence
• Responsibility
• Taxpayer-funded research
BEYOND PUBLISH OR PERISH
• Making your research
public
• “If your research does
not generate papers, it
might just as well not
have been done.” –
George Whitesides
• Papers provide the
shoulders that others
can stand on
 Duties of Authors
1. Reporting Standards: Authors should present an accurate account of the original research performed as well as
an objective discussion of its significance. Researchers should present their results honestly and without
fabrication, falsification or inappropriate data manipulation. A manuscript should contain sufficient detail and
references to permit others to replicate the work. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute
unethical behavior and are unacceptable. Manuscripts should follow the submission guidelines of the journal.

2. Originality and Plagiarism: Authors must ensure that they have written entirely original work. The manuscript
should not be submitted concurrently to more than one publication unless the editors have agreed to co-
publication. Relevant previous work and publications, both by other researchers and the authors’ own, should be
properly acknowledged and referenced. The primary literature should be cited where possible. Original wording
taken directly from publications by other researchers should appear in quotation marks with the appropriate
citations.

3. Multiple, Redundant, or Concurrent Publications: Author should not in general submit the same manuscript to
more than one journal concurrently. It is also expected that the author will not publish redundant manuscripts or
manuscripts describing same research in more than one journal. Submitting the same manuscript to more than
one journal concurrently constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable. Multiple publications
arising from a single research project should be clearly identified as such and the primary publication should be
referenced

4. Acknowledgement of Sources: Authors should acknowledge all sources of data used in the research and cite
publications that have been influential in determining the nature of the reported work. Proper acknowledgment
of the work of others must always be given.
 Duties of Authors
5. Authorship of the Paper: The authorship of research publications should accurately reflect individuals’
contributions to the work and its reporting. Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant
contribution to conception, design, execution or interpretation of the reported study. Others who have made
significant contribution must be listed as co-authors. In cases where major contributors are listed as authors
while those who made less substantial, or purely technical, contributions to the research or to the publication are
listed in an acknowledgement section. Authors also ensure that all the authors have seen and agreed to the
submitted version of the manuscript and their inclusion of names as co-authors.

6. Disclosure and Conflicts of Interest: All authors should clearly disclose in their manuscript any financial or
other substantive conflict of interest that might be construed to influence the results or interpretation of their
manuscript. All sources of financial support for the project should be disclosed.

7. Fundamental Errors in Published Works: If the author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in the
submitted manuscript, then the author should promptly notify the journal editor or publisher and cooperate
with the editor to retract or correct the paper.

8. Hazards and Human or Animal Subjects: The author should clearly identify in the manuscript if the work
involves chemicals, procedures or equipment that have any unusual hazards inherent in their use.
Publish and Perish, if you break the ethical rules

• International scientific ethics have evolved over

centuries and are commonly held throughout the
world.

• Scientific ethics are not considered to have national

variants or characteristics – there is a single ethical
standard for science.

• Ethics problems with scientific articles are on the rise

globally.
What is Ethics?
Morals - general rules of
conduct for society, may be
based in culture or religion,
includes personal beliefs of
right or wrong

Ethics - philosophical
science that rationally
examines moral beliefs and
behavior. The moral
principals and behavioral
codes that govern a
person’s or a groups
behavior. From the Greek
ethos – meaning custom or
habit
 What is Scientific Integrity?

• Adherence to ethical standards (honesty, integrity, trustworthiness)

the rigorous standards of the scientific process, and professional
values, codes, and practices of the scientific community.

• Ensures honesty, integrity, objectivity, clarity, reproducibility, and

utility of scientific research, publications, and communications.

• Not engaging in scientific misconduct such as bias, fabrication,

falsification, plagiarism, outside interference, censorship, conflict of
interest, theft of intellectual property, harassment, bias, and
inadequate procedural safety and security that endangers people,
animals, resources, or the environment.
 Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)

Authors
• Thorough, accurate, precise, objective account of the research,
methodology, assumptions, uncertainty, and supporting data
• Devoid of sensationalism, personal criticism, bias, opinion
• Ensure appropriateness of co-authors, ensure all co-authors agree
to content and revisions
• Never plagiarize or misrepresent data or research
• Identify all sources of information and citations

http://publicationethics.org/
5-minute Challenge – Scientific Integrity
• You help a friend with a
project that is similar to yours,
you give them some leads, What are the issues?
references, and a draft of your
paper in press. They are Who is affected?
struggling, do not have much
data, and are short on time. What are the rules?
• In a month you head to GSA, What are your options?
visit your friends poster, you
recognize passages from your What resources are there?
paper and other references –
nearly verbatim and no Lessons learned?
citations; his data graphs look
perfect; he is the lone author;
and now here he is smiling,
and strolling up to you.

• What do you do?

 Research Misconduct

• Research misconduct is defined as behaviour by a researcher,

intentional or not, that falls short of good ethical and scientific
standards . Edinburgh 1999

BMJ 2012;344:e1111 doi: 10.1136/bmj.e1111

 Research misconduct

• Fabrication • Misleading reporting

• Redundant publication
• Falsification
• Authorship malpractice such as
• Suppression guest or ghost authorship
• Inappropriate manipulation of data • Failure to disclose funding
• Inappropriate image manipulation sources or competing interests
• Plagiarism • Misreporting of funder
involvement; and unethical
research (for example, failure to
obtain adequate patient consent)
 Fabrication & Falsification

• Fabrication (‘dry labbing’) is the making up of false research data

without actually doing any experiment.

• Falsification is the manipulation of research data or processes or

omitting critical data or results. Experiment is done at least to a
certain extent but methodology is falsified to obtain ‘desired’ results.
 Example 1

• The ‘patchwork mouse’ of William Summerlin (1974) at Memorial Sloan

Kettering Hospital has almost become synonymous with the term
fabrication (Hixson 1976; Summerlin et al. 1973).

• Summerlin claimed that he had transplanted tissue successfully from one

species of mice (black) to another species of mice (white) by keeping the
tissue in culture for 4 weeks to 6 weeks.

• Investigations revealed that Summerlin had turned some white rats into
black rats by drawing black patches on their skin using a black coloured
marker pen (‘patchwork mouse’).
Example 2
• Dr. Ranjit Chandra’s study in Canada published in September 2001
edition of ‘Nutrition’ claimed that a multivitamin formula that he
had patented could reverse memory loss problems in geriatric
population (http://www.cbc.ca/national/news/chandra)accessed on
• 4/8/08).

• This was later found to be a fabricated study with no available data

to support the outlandish claim.

• Dr. Chandra took the art fabrication to a new level by getting another
fabricated article authored by one Amrit Jain published in his own
journal wherein the findings were supportive of Dr. Chandra’s earlier
findings.

• This time, not only the data but even the author ‘Amrit Jain’ was
fabricated as such a person was not traceable at all!
 Example 4

• South Korean researcher Hwang Woo-Suk published 2 papers in

‘Science’ in 2004 and 2005 where he reported to have cloned human
embryonic stem cells (Hwang et al. 2005).

• Subsequent investigations revealed that the data was fabricated and

no embryonic stem cells were actually found as claimed by the
researcher. The papers were later retracted by ‘Science’ (Kennedy
2006).
 Example 5

• Norweigean oncologist Jon Sudbø managed to publish a fabricated

paper in ‘The Lancet’ in 2005 in which he claimed that anti-
inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen diminish the risk of oral cancer
in smokers.

• Out of the 908 ‘patients’ in Sudbø’s study 250 were noted to have the
same date of birth! Subsequent inquiry revealedthat as many as 15 of
his articles were fraudulent (Couzin and Schirber 2006; http://news.
bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4617372.stm)accessed on 4/8/08).
 Plagiarism

• Involves publication of others work as ones own work or copying

others articles with minor modifications and publishing it as a new
study. One of the definitions of

• Plagiarism quoted by Eugene Garfield is that it is “the act of

appropriating the literary compositions of another, or parts and
passages of his writings, or the ideas or language of the same, and
passing them off as the product of one’s own mind” (Black’s Law
Dictionary 1979; Garfield 1980).
 Example

• Iraqi researcher Elias Alsabati’s thirst for plagiarism remains

unparalled.

• He seems to have plagiarised more than 50 articles relating to cancer

and immunology research getting many of them published in reputed
journals (Broad 1980).
 Types of plagiarism

• Plagiarism has been classified into two major types:

• Grand larceny plagiarism
• Petty larceny plagiarism (Merton 1979).
Grand larceny is a crime in which something very valuable
is stolen.
• Grand larceny plagiarism involves outright copying of entire texts and
petty larceny involves use of ideas without explicit citation of the
sources.
• Petty larceny plagiarism is far more common than grand larceny plagiarism.

Grand larceny is typically defined as larceny of a more Petty theft refers to a criminal act in which property belonging
significant amount of property. to another is taken without that person's consent. ... Larceny
generally refers to nonviolent theft and is usually a misdemeanor.
• The term ‘ discoverer’ s complex’ has been used by Sorokin to
describe the attitude of one generation of scientists to assume that
they are the first to become aware of a particular phenomenon and
that the previous generations were ignorant about it.

• The latter generation of scientists simply assumes that it is more

intelligent and better informed than the previous generations
(Sorokin 1956).
 Different ways of plagiarism:

• Plagiarism of secondary sources

• Plagiarism of ideas

• Word for word plagiarism

• Paraphrasing plagiarism

• Plagiarism of authorship
 Plagiarism of secondary sources

• The author cites references but from secondary sources and

does not bother to read the primary source.
 Plagiarism of ideas

• The ideas of another author are borrowed but the wordings and
format of presentation are changed.
 Word for word plagiarism

• Involves exact copying of phrases from a previously published work

without citation.
 Paraphrasing plagiarism

• Some words are changed but not sufficiently enough.

• Some paraphrasing may be necessary to state the ideas but it should

be done in an acceptable way and with full citation of the source.

• Omitting quotation marks and providing incomplete citation are also

considered as plagiarism.
 Plagiarism of authorship

• A person claims himself or herself to be the author of a complete work belonging to others.

• This is probably the meanest form of plagiarism.

• It often occurs when mentors plagiarise the work done by their students or junior researchers and
completely deny authorship to the vulnerable students even though the entire research may have
been conceived and conducted by the students with hardly any participation by the mentor. The
junior person.

• often never gets any justice as exemplified by the case of Michael Pyshnov’s research concerning
cell division in the University of Toronto was ‘stolen’ by his mentor and her coterie of co-authors.
All Pyshnov got after his fight for justice was loss of career as a brilliant researcher
(http://ca.geocities.com/uoftfraud/ruthless.htm) accessed on 15/7/08).

• http://www.universitytorontofraud.com/
Omission of citation of the relevant work of other
researchers

• the most common type of scientific misconduct.

• This behaviour was called ‘citation amnesia’ by science sociologist

Robert Merton, ‘bibliographic neglect’ by Eugene Garfield and
‘disregard syndrome’ by Issac Ginsburg (Merton 1973; Ginsburg
2001; Garfield 1991, 2002).
• The authors of an article claim that they are the first to describe a
phenomenon but ‘forget’ to cite an important similar contribution
published earlier by other authors. This may be purely due to
oversight on the part of the researchers.

• It can also be a wilful act of omission in the race to establish priority

of authorship. The latter action amounts to plagiarism as a certain
work belonging to a researcher is being reproduced without due
credit to the original researcher. This type of misconduct may lead to
unfair loss of priority of authorship for the initial authors (Garfield
1982).
 palimpsestic syndrome

• Sometimes the researchers may cite an article in their list of

references with regard to a particular discovery or innovation but the
author cited is not the original discoverer or innovator.

• The cited article simply describes the research work of the original
author.

writing material (such as a parchment or tablet) used

one or more times after earlier writing has been erased.
 obliteration phenomenon

• Some facts of science become so well known and are incorporated

into the canonical body of knowledge so much so that others do not
feel the need to cite them at all.

• This is called ‘ obliteration phenomenon’ by Garfield (Garfield 1979).

Obliteration to remove or destroy all traces of; do

away with; destroy completely.
 Selective journal self citation

• Articles tend to preferentially cite other articles in the same journal.

This behaviour may be abetted by the editors to increase the impact
factor of their journal (Delgado López-Cózar 2007).
 Multiple publication

• Publication of the same content with or without minor modifications

in different journals under different titles.

• The author/s publish data without citing the earlier publication in the
same field elsewhere.

• It is also referred to as:

• Autoplagiarism, self-plagiarism duplicate publication, concurrent publication,
simultaneous submission, dual publication or potentially dual publication.
 Example:

• Merton cites the example of Otto Loewi, a Nobel Prize winner in

physiology who redid research on chemical neurotransmission
without realising his own work on the same subject 18 years earlier
(Merton 1973).
 Divided publication (salami slicing or data fragmentation)

• Bit by bit publication of the data and results of what is essentially a single
experiment.

• This is done to artificially increase the number of publications as well as

citation counts to increase the ‘impact’ of the publication.
• Some universities have tried to discourage the tendency for salami slicing
and dual publication by limiting the number of articles that the candidates
are allowed to put on the bio-data that they submit to the university (Lock
1994).

• This is to send a message to the researchers that quality of research is

more important than sheer quantity.
 Data augmentation

• A type of scientific misconduct wherein a researcher first publishes a

study in a journal and later collects additional data to fortify his or her
own research an publishes the combination of the old as well as the
new results together as a new study I another journal.
 Unethical allocation of authorship credit

• Disputed authorship :
• Disputed authorship occurs when other researchers question a particular
person’ s right to be the author or co-author of an article.
• Disagreement over authorship negatively affects the good will and reputation
of the individual authors.

• Guest authorship:
• One who has not done any significant work towards the paper but has his
name as one of the authors.
• Types of guest authorship:
• Gift authorship, pressured authorship and ghost authorship
 Gift author

• The gift author may be a senior researcher who ha a say in promotion and salary
of the authors who are gifting th authorship.

• Gift authorshi is not without its dangers.

• Example:
• Gift authorship of Professor Geoffrey Chamberlain in fraudulent case report by Malcolm
Pearce in the British Journal of Obstetrics an gynaecology titled ‘Term Delivery after
Intrauterine Relocation o Ectopic Pregnancy proved very costly for Professor Chamberlain
(http://www.bmj.com/collections/author1 htm)accessed on 3/8/08).
 Ghost writing

• The named author is not the actual author of the article.

• This is typically resorted to by drug companies to mask their

involvement in the research (to hide conflict of interest).

• Because the real author is known to have close links with the
company his or her name is substituted by the name of other author
who is not identified with the company.
 Pressured authorship

• The original researchers have been forced to include the name of a

senior colleague due to the fear of his or her authority in the
institution.

• Kwok has termed the senior researcher who abuses his juniors to gain
undue authorship credit a ‘white bull’ indulging in ‘publication
parasitism’ (Kwok 2005).
 Irresponsible co-authorship

• The primary author would have falsified or fabricated the experiment

without the knowledge of co-authors.

• Even if the co-authors are not involved in falsification or

fabrication, they are still guilty of misconduct as they have not verified the
contents of the paper that carries their names.

• Example:
• Dr. Gerald Schlatten from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine was a co-
author. When the fraud was exposed Dr. Schlatten claimed that he had played only
an ‘advisory’ role in the study and had no active part in it. Though the University of
Pittsburgh cleared him of scientific misconduct it held him guilty of ‘misbehaviour’ in
failing to ensure the veracity of the data in the paper (Parry 2006).
 How big is the problem?

Up to 200,000 of 17 million articles in Medline

database may be duplicates, or plagiarized
Errami & Garner. Nature 451, 397-399 (2008)
 Author:
Authorship someone who has made substantive
intellectual contributions to a published study

International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE)

at http://www.icmje.org/ states authorship is based on:

1)substantial contributions to the conception and design of a

paper, or acquisition of data or analysis and interpretation
of data, and,

2)drafting the article or revising it critically for important

intellectual content and final approval of the version to be
published.
Preventing Plagiarism in
Published Works

Turnitin: https://www.turnitin.com/
•10 Best Free Plagiarism Checker 2020 (UPDATED)
•Duplichecker.
•PaperRater.
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•PlagScan.
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Scientific Integrity and Trust

Reason for Retraction:

During the second revision of the manuscript, the
authors modified Figure 1 (changing the label from
"Israel" to "Historical Palestine"). The authors did not
inform the editors or the publisher of this change in
their manuscript. As such, the authors have not lived up
to the standards of trust and integrity that form the
foundation of the peer-review process. The Editors-in-
Chief take a strong view on this matter and, hence, the
retraction of the article from publication in Agricultural
Water Management.
Retraction on the basis of plagiarism

“The retraction has been agreed due

to overlap with other previously
published material written by third
parties”
The article of which the authors committed plagiarism will
not be removed from ScienceDirect. Everybody who
downloads it will see the reason of retraction.
Retraction on the basis of duplication

“The retraction has been agreed due to

duplicate publication of the same article
in two journals”
 Predatory Journal

1. Does not have a clear indexing

2. Not registered as a member of COPE (Committee on Puclication Ethics), OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers
Association), STM (International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers) and/or DOAJ
(Directory of Open Access Journal).
3. Requesting a publication fee (Article Processing Charge) before the article is declared accepted (accepted).
4. The peer review process does not exist or is very minimal and is not related to scientific content
5. Editorial Boards consist of scientists who are not known to the community.
6. Articles that have been published (past issues) have many typo and grammatical errors, and are published very
quickly
7. The contact information is in a dubious country or area and is difficult to verify.
8. Predatory journals do not have clear bank accounts that match the address
9. Beware of predatory journals that duplicate the original journal (Fake Journal) with fake names and website
addresses (as if they were real).
Direktorat Publikasi Ilmiah dan Informasi Strategis

THANK YOU
Email: rdikky@apps.ipb.ac.id

2022