Reviews on ethics problem of publishing
Prepared by:
Wen Huang
Department of
Materials physics, Uppsala University
1. Introduction
When we are doing research, we need to publish the results to share with people. There are different ways of publishing it, for example people writes a book or result is published on the journal. There are many reasons behind publishing results [1]. It is the way of the contribution to the transmission of the knowledge to the whole society, and other scientists can learn new knowledge and know what work has been done, and people can get new ideas from the publishing work. It also serves as a way to assess the worth of the scientists when they are applying for a new position. It means that number of papers is very important for scientists based on the above aspects listed. Then many people want to publish papers as much as possible. Then many ethic problems behind publishing will come to us during the whole process, which should be treated very seriously.
The research work publishing is also related to other organizations or people, for example the media, editors, colleagues, etc. As scientist, we should treat these relationships very carefully and justly. If it is not treated in the right way, it will have negative effect on the whole development of the science.
Based on the above problems listed, these ethics problem behind the publishing will be discussed in this report.
2. The different ethics problems for publishing [1]
· Disclosure of financial support and scientific dependence
It is necessary to mention that where the funding for this project is coming from in the paper. You cannot make up new source of the funding. You also cannot ignore or eliminate any information about the organization that gives the financial support. If scientist has new ideas based on other people’s results, or develops his arguments in the dialogue with other people in the conference or somewhere. It is important to describe this relationship and describes where all the ideas are coming from. If the other people cannot be the co-authors, it is good to mention them in the acknowledgement.
· Clear research background, methods and conclusion
We should have detailed and clear introduction on the research background, research methods and conclusion. The research background should be included into the beginning of the published reports; materials or research methods should be described clearly in the published paper. They also need to have available references. Materials or research background should be real and should be convenient to be found in the literature for other scientists. Authors cannot hide any information, which is contradictory or not good to the current research background and research methods.
· The role of media
The media plays an important role in spreading news. They sometimes exaggerate news in order to attract people attention. You only tell them after you are sure what you get is right. Scientists should keep an appropriate distance with the media, but should not totally leave the media. Scientists cannot tell the media if they just have preliminary and unverified results. Otherwise this can make people misunderstand after it is published through media. If this happens often, the public trust in research could disappear, which may shut off the source of funding used for research. It is very harmful.
· Number of publication and merit
Nowadays the number of papers or citation for scientists plays an important role in finding a new position or applying for funding. In order to get papers as much as possible, many scientists publish their results with different title in different journal, but with roughly the same content. This is not allowed. And this will make people only focus on the number of paper instead of quality of their research, which will affect the development of the science. I of course agree many countries, for example in Sweden, the evaluation of the funding distribution on research is based on citation of the paper instead of the number of the papers. But I think there is still some countries or university where they evaluate the funding distribution by the number of the paper, which is a very convenient way for them. This phenomenon should be prohibited.
· Authorship in the paper
We also need to make clear what the contribution for each co-author is. This can make us know what work different people in the paper have done. This can motivate the cooperation interest or passion on the project. The first author cannot hide the contribution from other people or exaggerate own contribution to this work, the first author usually has made the most important contribution. And also if someone already contributes a lot to the research and writing, his name should be on the paper. His or her name cannot be eliminated if there is conflict with the first author. Of course scientists cannot add their friends’ names on the paper if they really do not have any significant contribution.
· The responsible publisher and the editor
The editor of a journal is mainly responsible to the evaluation of its scientific quality. They should request clarification of the research work, which is not clear. The editor cannot decrease the requirement of publishing if the author is his friend or if the author is already a famous professor in this field. If the editor has some conflict with the any one of the authors, the editor cannot reject publishing if it is beautiful work,
3. Conclusion and Recommendations
Publishing is an important process for the whole research work. It played an important role in the development of the science and knowing the world for people. That means that good quality publishing is very necessary and important. As scientists, we should be objective to publish our experiment results and all editors should evaluate the results very carefully and justly. The media should not exaggerate the facts or information coming from scientists. If everyone treats these problems seriously, a good research circumstance will be formed and the whole society will develop faster.
Reference
1. Bengt Gustafsson, Göran Hermerén and Bo Pettersson. Good research practice.