Research Ethics


Doing the right thing will not necessarily bring success but compromising the ethics almost leads to failure.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Ethics are basic principle which shows  how an activity should be conducted. Ethics are crucial in research as it supports collaboration which is really important in scientific research.
 
Ethics and research go hand in hand as ethics define those moral ideals and principles that a person must follow, irrespective of the place or time of doing the research. Research ethics focus on the ethos and moral principles that a researcher must follow no matter which field of research they are working in.
  Research follows scientific and systematic process and ethics should be followed in each at every step.
 
Ethics in Selection of Research Problem
A research problem is defined as the problem in which researcher is interested in and wants to explore its dimensions. Following are the ethics to be considered while deciding on research topic:

Subject which is overdone and is controversial should not be chosen. It should be interesting and unique.
One should not keep the research problem too narrow or too vague. It should always be specific.
It should be feasible to be carried out by the researcher in a defined time span. It should not take years and years to complete the research.
The variables chosen for the research should be measurable or observed.
Research topic should not be copied from other’s work unless there is really a good scope of improvement in existing work. If so, the results obtained from the research should be highly significant.
One should always check the importance of the research topic for its relevance in current scenario.

 
Ethics in Literature Review
A literature review is a comprehensive summary of previous research on a topic. The literature review surveys, enumerates, describes, summarizes, objectively evaluates and clarifies the previous research and work concluded by them. Many people do not understand it properly and take it lightly when it comes to do ethical literature review.
 
There are certain things to be taken care of while writing a literature review:

The secondary data that a researcher collects should be truthful and stated as given.
In-text citation is crucial when taking other’s work into research work.
Proper credit should be given to the researcher for extracting data from their research.
Researcher should have respect for Intellectual Property rights such as patents, copyrights and other intellectual property. While writing literature review, one should make sure that it is paraphrased properly, else it is considered as plagiarized content. One should check the plagiarism score of their work and it should not be more than 20%. It is important to...

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