It is just over a year since the editors of this journal announced a broadening of the remit for submission. In doing so they made an explicit commitment to supporting work that examines research integrity issues. Furthering this commitment, we announce that Dr Edward Dove has joined Research Ethics as Associate Editor, with a focus on overseeing manuscripts that concern research integrity and/or misconduct matters.
The journal Research Ethics is congratulated for this excellent approach. Clearly, institutions and programmes have clear roles to play in the governance of responsible practice, but we must recognise and celebrate good practice by researchers is the more constructive area to focus. Resourcing reflective practice is a better long term and sustainable investment in good science than policing compliance and punishing breaches.
Research integrity is at the core of several papers in this issue. For instance, in their study of ethical issues in internet research and research using online data, Stommel and de Rijk examine how ethical issues are reported, and in what ways, as well as the steps that authors take to protect the privacy of the sources of publicly available online data. They note that almost two thirds of the 132 articles they examined did not report ethical considerations yet commonly took steps to anonymise data. Notably, the discussion of ethical issues was highly variable with discrepancies between ethics principles in theory and in practice.
Nicholls, S.G. (2021) Research integrity: emphasising our commitment. Research Ethics. 17(3) pp265-266
Publisher (Creative Commons – Attribution): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17470161211028740