Ethics in Research and Scholarly Practice

“The ethical stance in research… is guided by a deeply respectful partnership between the researcher’s aims and the people and phenomena involved in the study. Ethics involves deciding how to best honor and protect those who willingly give over some aspect of themselves in exchange for the advancement of knowledge.”                                                                                                                                                                                                 Lynn Kapitan

Quimby Memorial Library supports students and faculty of Southwestern College in approaching, designing, and executing academic research in a manner that meets current ethical standards and honors the spirits of cooperation and respect, central to the great humane act of discovery.

Ethics in Scholarly Practice

“…since research often involves a great deal of cooperation and coordination among many different people in different disciplines and institutions, ethical standards promote the values that are essential to collaborative work, such as trust, accountability, mutual respect, and fairness.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   David B. Resnik

Ethical practices in research and academic writing are not only about fairness but accuracy. Dishonesty in data collection and reporting, failure to adequately credit sources… such approaches serve only to distance one’s scholarly work from truth and thus from usefulness. Aspiring to ethical standards maintains the soul of one’s work and accurately contextualizes its contributions within the wider world of scholarship and scientific knowledge. The following resources will help you define and achieve these standards.

This chapter from the seventh edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association provides clarification on topics like how to adequately credit sources and how to avoid plagiarism and self-plagiarism. It also provides details on formatting standards for in-text citations.

Here’s a summary of ethical principles, which guide decisions related to ethics in research and scholarly practices and are addressed by various codes of ethics.

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Ethics in Academic Research:

Quimby Memorial Library advocates for a thorough understanding of ethics as a foundational element of the research process and supports students in achieving this understanding by offering free, remote access to key sections of relevant codes of ethics and academic texts that illuminate the philosophies and processes informing ethical research practices.

Key Statements:

AATA (2013). Ethical Principles for Art Therapists, Section 9: Responsibility to research participants

ACA Code of Ethics 2014. Section G, Research and Publication

APA (2016). Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, Section 8:Research and Publication

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Further Reading: A bibliography on ethical practices in social research  

Further Reading: A bibliography on conducting research with vulnerable populations