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Research and publication ethics

This Section considers manuscripts on all aspects of research and publication ethics, including, but not limited to, the ethics of research designs, ethical approval, consent, authorship and contributorship, competing interests and all forms of research and publication misconduct on the part of authors, reviewers and editors. The Section also welcomes manuscripts focused on the effects of academic reward systems on publication behaviour, journal funding and income sources, and relations between editors and publishers and editorial freedom.


  1. Retraction is a mechanism for alerting readers to unreliable material and other problems in the published scientific and scholarly record. Retracted publications generally remain visible and searchable, but t...

    Authors: Jodi Schneider, Nathan D. Woods and Randi Proescholdt
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2022 7:6
    Content type: Research Published on:

  2. The current paper follows up on the results of an exploratory quantitative analysis that compared the publication and citation records of men and women researchers affiliated with the Faculty of Computing and ...

    Authors: Mohammad Hosseini and Shiva Sharifzad
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2021 6:15
    Content type: Research Published on:

  3. Australian health and medical research funders support substantial research efforts, and incentives within grant funding schemes influence researcher behaviour. We aimed to determine to what extent Australian ...

    Authors: Joanna Diong, Cynthia M. Kroeger, Katherine J. Reynolds, Adrian Barnett and Lisa A. Bero
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2021 6:11
    Content type: Research Published on:

  4. Healthcare professionals are exposed to advertisements for prescription drugs in medical journals. Such advertisements may increase prescriptions of new drugs at the expense of older treatments even when they ...

    Authors: Kim Boesen, Anders Lykkemark Simonsen, Karsten Juhl Jørgensen and Peter C. Gøtzsche
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2021 6:8
    Content type: Research Published on:

    The Correction to this article has been published in Research Integrity and Peer Review 2021 6:10

  5. Concerns about research misbehavior in academic science have sparked interest in the factors that may explain research misbehavior. Often three clusters of factors are distinguished: individual factors, climat...

    Authors: Tamarinde Haven, Joeri Tijdink, Brian Martinson, Lex Bouter and Frans Oort
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2021 6:7
    Content type: Research Published on:

  8. Research misconduct and questionable research practices have been the subject of increasing attention in the past few years. But despite the rich body of research available, few empirical works also include th...

    Authors: Noémie Aubert Bonn and Wim Pinxten
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2021 6:3
    Content type: Research Published on:

  9. Success shapes the lives and careers of scientists. But success in science is difficult to define, let alone to translate in indicators that can be used for assessment. In the past few years, several groups ex...

    Authors: Noémie Aubert Bonn and Wim Pinxten
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2021 6:1
    Content type: Research Published on:

  10. Research on research integrity has tended to focus on frequency of research misconduct and factors that might induce someone to commit research misconduct. A definitive answer to the first question has been el...

    Authors: Michael Kalichman
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2020 5:17
    Content type: Research Published on:

  11. Titles and abstracts are the most read sections of biomedical papers. It is therefore important that abstracts transparently report both the beneficial and adverse effects of health care interventions and do n...

    Authors: Pauline A. J. Steegmans, Nicola Di Girolamo and Reint A. Meursinge Reynders
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2019 4:27
    Content type: Study protocol Published on:

  12. There is increasing evidence that research misbehaviour is common, especially the minor forms. Previous studies on research misbehaviour primarily focused on biomedical and social sciences, and evidence from n...

    Authors: Tamarinde L. Haven, Joeri K. Tijdink, H. Roeline Pasman, Guy Widdershoven, Gerben ter Riet and Lex M. Bouter
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2019 4:25
    Content type: Research Published on:

  14. We provide additional information relevant to our previous publication on the quality of reports of investigations of research integrity by academic institutions. Despite concerns being raised about ethical ov...

    Authors: Andrew Grey, Mark Bolland and Alison Avenell
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2019 4:22
    Content type: Letter Published on:

  16. Numerous recommendations and guidelines aim to improve the quality, timeliness and transparency of medical publications. However, these guidelines use ambiguous language that can be challenging to interpret, p...

    Authors: Blair R. Hesp, Katsuhisa Arai, Magdalene Y. S. Chu, Stefanie Chuah, Jose Miguel B. Curameng, Sandeep Kamat, Zhigang Ma, Andrew Sakko and Hazel Fernandez
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2019 4:21
    Content type: Commentary Published on:

  18. Both scientists and society at large have rightfully become increasingly concerned about research integrity in recent decades. In response, codes of conduct for research have been developed and elaborated. We ...

    Authors: Rik Peels, Jeroen de Ridder, Tamarinde Haven and Lex Bouter
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2019 4:18
    Content type: Commentary Published on:

  19. Although a large number of clinical trials on interventions demonstrating efficacy (or lack thereof) are conducted annually, much of this evidence is not accessible to scientists and clinicians.

    Authors: Sharain Suliman, Leigh van den Heuvel, Alexandra Suryapranata, Jonathan I. Bisson and Soraya Seedat
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2019 4:15
    Content type: Research Published on:

  20. Research that has been sponsored by pharmaceutical, medical device and biotechnology companies is often presented at scientific and medical conferences. However, practices vary between organizations and it can...

    Authors: Cate Foster, Elizabeth Wager, Jackie Marchington, Mina Patel, Steve Banner, Nina C. Kennard, Antonia Panayi and Rianne Stacey
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2019 4:11
    Content type: Research Published on:

  21. A recent commentary argued for arbitration to resolve authorship disputes within academic research settings explaining that current mechanisms to resolve conflicts result in unclear outcomes and institutional ...

    Authors: Zubin Master and Evelyn Tenenbaum
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2019 4:10
    Content type: Commentary Published on:

    The original article was published in Research Integrity and Peer Review 2018 3:12

  22. Reducing the number of animals used in experiments has become a priority for the governments of many countries. For these reductions to occur, animal-free alternatives must be made more available and, cruciall...

    Authors: S. Bressers, H. van den Elzen, C. Gräwe, D. van den Oetelaar, P. H. A. Postma and S. K. Schoustra
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2019 4:8
    Content type: Research Published on:

  23. The emphasis on impact factors and the quantity of publications intensifies competition between researchers. This competition was traditionally considered an incentive to produce high-quality work, but there a...

    Authors: Tamarinde L. Haven, Marije Esther Evalien de Goede, Joeri K. Tijdink and Frans Jeroen Oort
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2019 4:7
    Content type: Methodology Published on:

  25. A large number of scientists and several news platforms have, over the last few years, been speaking of a replication crisis in various academic disciplines, especially the biomedical and social sciences. This...

    Authors: Rik Peels
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2019 4:2
    Content type: Commentary Published on:

  26. The progression of research and scholarly inquiry does not occur in isolation and is wholly dependent on accurate reporting of methods and results, and successful replication of prior work. Without mechanisms ...

    Authors:
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2018 3:15
    Content type: Commentary Published on:

    The Commentary to this article has been published in Research Integrity and Peer Review 2018 3:14

  29. Disputes over authorship are increasing. This paper examines the options that researchers have in resolving authorship disputes. Discussions about authorship disputes often address how to prevent disputes but ...

    Authors: Zen Faulkes
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2018 3:12
    Content type: Commentary Published on:

    The Commentary to this article has been published in Research Integrity and Peer Review 2019 4:10

  31. This paper describes the experience of an academic institution, the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), developing training courses about research integrity practices in authorship, publication, and Jou...

    Authors: Mark Hooper, Virginia Barbour, Anne Walsh, Stephanie Bradbury and Jane Jacobs
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2018 3:2
    Content type: Commentary Published on:

  32. Deciphering the amount of work provided by different co-authors of a scientific paper has been a recurrent problem in science. Despite the myriad of metrics available, the scientific community still largely re...

    Authors: Stéphane Boyer, Takayoshi Ikeda, Marie-Caroline Lefort, Jagoba Malumbres-Olarte and Jason M. Schmidt
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2017 2:18
    Content type: Methodology Published on:

  33. Research Ethics Boards, or Institutional Review Boards, protect the safety and welfare of human research participants. These bodies are responsible for providing an independent evaluation of proposed research ...

    Authors: Stacey A. Page and Jeffrey Nyeboer
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2017 2:14
    Content type: Commentary Published on:

  35. The annual number of retracted publications in the scientific literature is rapidly increasing. The objective of this study was to determine the frequency and reason for retraction of cancer publications and t...

    Authors: Anthony Bozzo, Kamal Bali, Nathan Evaniew and Michelle Ghert
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2017 2:5
    Content type: Research Published on:

  38. Codes of conduct mainly focus on research misconduct that takes the form of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. However, at the aggregate level, lesser forms of research misbehavior may be more importa...

    Authors: Lex M. Bouter, Joeri Tijdink, Nils Axelsen, Brian C. Martinson and Gerben ter Riet
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2016 1:17
    Content type: Research Published on:

    The Correction to this article has been published in Research Integrity and Peer Review 2019 4:13

  39. We have national guidelines for the responsible conduct of research (RCR) and procedures for handling allegations of misconduct in Finland. The guidelines have been formulated and updated by the Finnish Adviso...

    Authors: Liisa Räsänen and Erja Moore
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2016 1:15
    Content type: Commentary Published on:

  40. Plagiarism is common and threatens the integrity of the scientific literature. However, its detection is time consuming and difficult, presenting challenges to editors and publishers who are entrusted with ens...

    Authors: Janet R. Higgins, Feng-Chang Lin and James P. Evans
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2016 1:13
    Content type: Research Published on:

  41. In about one in 10,000 cases, a published article is retracted. This very often means that the results it reports are flawed. Several authors have voiced concerns about the presence of retracted research in th...

    Authors: Paul E. van der Vet and Harm Nijveen
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2016 1:3
    Content type: Research Published on:

  42. Conflicts of interest held by researchers remain a focus of attention in clinical research. Biases related to these relationships have the potential to directly impact the quality of healthcare by influencing ...

    Authors: Adam G. Dunn, Enrico Coiera, Kenneth D. Mandl and Florence T. Bourgeois
    Citation: Research Integrity and Peer Review 2016 1:1
    Content type: Review Published on:

Research Integrity and Peer Review

ISSN: 2058-8615

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