Research and Publication Ethics

Research and Publication Ethics offers a principled, practice-oriented guide to ethical scholarship, grounded in philosophy and attentive to the everyday realities of research and publishing. Written for doctoral scholars, early-career researchers, faculty members, and research administrators, the book treats ethics not as a checklist for compliance but as a formative discipline rooted in truth, dignity, and trust. It advances a clear core claim: research is sacred work-an ethical covenant between investigators and participants, authors and readers, institutions and society.

Developed from a long-running course taught to FPM/Ph.D. scholars at XLRI, the book bears the imprint of classroom debate, case discussion, and reflective practice. It moves deliberately from first principles to daily procedures. The opening chapters clarify why philosophy matters to research, examining concepts of reality, evidence, logic, and value that underlie all scholarly methods. Subsequent chapters address scientific conduct and publication ethics in detail, including study design, data stewardship, honest reporting, authorship norms, peer review, conflicts of interest, reproducibility, and remedies for misconduct.

A distinctive feature of the book is its sustained engagement with the Indian research context. Ethical challenges arising from linguistic diversity, community-based research, unequal access to infrastructure, and intense publication pressures are addressed with practical guidance and proportionate safeguards. The text aligns closely with the University Grants Commission's syllabus on Research and Publication Ethics and is structured as a teachable, examinable module, complete with case-based reasoning, procedural checklists, and classroom-ready units.

The later chapters extend ethics into practice through focused labs on plagiarism and integrity tools, open access publishing choices, databases and research metrics, discovery and documentation workflows, and responsible visibility. Throughout, the emphasis remains on clarity of claims, fairness in credit and evaluation, and the moral necessity of repair through correction, re-analysis, or retraction when errors occur. From foundational philosophy to hands-on ethical decision-making, the book aims to cultivate researchers who can think clearly, act justly, and sustain public trust in scholarship.