Company News

Module 5 explains in detail about conflicts of interest and intellectual property.

Tune in to our bitesize webinar to learn more.

Intellectual property (IP) includes patents, copyright, database rights and trademarks. As a researcher who works as part of an institution, and as such is financially supported by the institution, there are typically policies that govern who owns the IP related to your research. It is important to know these policies.

This article examines the need and prevalence of increased inclusion, diversity and transparency in the peer review process while exploring the theme of Peer Review Week 2021: Identity in Peer Review.

It might feel like a waste to use a poster for only one conference and you might find yourself starting to think of ways to reuse it for other academic events. But how wise or effective is it to recycle your research posters? This article offers some important factors to consider as you decide where to present your poster.

Multiple submissions of the same paper to several conferences may seem like a good idea to boost your academic profile. However, this is generally regarded as bad practice and not altogether ethical. This article outlines key points to consider if you are thinking of submitting the same paper to multiple places. 

You will probably already know that you should always be very careful about citing and referencing other work in your research. But what about using, citing and referencing your own work? In this article, we break down everything you need to know about citing and referencing your previous research.

Making reference to – citing – published research within scientific articles and books is intrinsic to the process of showing the context of your own research in relation to previously published material.

Are you sure that the conference you plan to attend is really all that it appears to be? We’ve recently seen an upsurge in the number of ‘predatory’ academic conferences.

One of the trickiest and most controversial aspects of academic publishing is deciding ‘who did what’ during research article writing.

Early in your academic career the best publishing strategy to adopt is one that ensures you develop a reputation as a reliable and effective researcher.

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) has highlighted the issue of extreme self-citation as one key form of citation manipulation that journals, editors, and publishers should address.

'Gift authorship’ is one of the most common kinds of unethical behaviour seen in academic publishing. In this practice, an author is added to a paper when they have not actually made a contribution to the work, perhaps to reward a collaborator, return a favour, or for some other gain. 

Re-using an image from an earlier paper is re-publishing something that you, or another author, has previously used in an earlier article. This is possible, but requires permission in some form or another.

What is plagiarism?

Most researchers are already familiar with the concept of plagiarism, which is presenting someone else’s intellectual property – text, images, ideas, etc. – as your own.

There are a number of different topics that come under the heading ‘publication ethics’, all of which have to do with how researchers present their work to the wider scientific community. In this post, we will talk about a number of behaviors related to publication ethics.

As so many academics can tell you, nothing is more frustrating than working for months on a paper and then receiving an almost immediate rejection from your target journal. Data has been collated by major publishing companies that reveals some of the main reasons academic research papers get rejected by handling editors without peer review.

Retraction is removing an article from the scientific record at any point after its publication. Retraction is distinct from withdrawal, which occurs prior to publication. Also, in contrast to withdrawal, retractions are visible to the scientific community, as the original papers are typically preserved as part of the publication record.

When you use other people’s ideas, writing, or work, and represent these as your own without giving the original authors proper credit, this is plagiarism. If you work with students, teaching or mentoring, you have likely warned them against the consequences of plagiarism. Many institutions have detailed policies about plagiarism, and clearly articulate the consequences of this for students, faculty and staff.

When you are conducting research there are a number of ethical principles that should be taken into account, especially if your research involves human subjects. One basic principle all researchers should follow is ‘do no harm’.

This module explains what ethical research is and how to conduct ethical research. Here we also discuss the elements of an IRB Proposal and the questions that guide the review process.

Tune in to our bitesize webinar to learn more.