Reflections on Academic Research and Writing (Part 2): Ethical Publishing

This piece was originally posted in Management INK, a blog highlighting top scholarship and catering to academics, researchers and practitioners in the management and business fields. We present it now as part of the #AcWriMo series on MethodSpace.Publication ethics continues to be an enduring topic touching on a wide range of increasingly complicated issues. For journal editors and publishers, as well as researchers, there are concerns regarding plagiarism, data and citation manipulation, conflicts of interest, and even identifying legitimate publishing sources, among others.  COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics), of which SAGE, many of our journals, and others in the publishing community are members, serves as a valuable resource for promoting integrity in research publications, offering advice, forums, guidelines, a Code of Conduct and more. At the journal level, there is also good work being produced to promote research and publishing ethics.A good example is found in the editorial of the June 2015 issue of Family Business Review where Tyge Payne and Duane Ireland take up key issues regarding ethics in family business research with far-reaching relevance.  Looking not only at the particular ethical problems in research, they expand the conversation to include the role of the wider scholarly community – researchers, reviewers, editors and institutional leaders – in dealing with ongoing ethical concerns in scholarly publishing. How do you build a community of responsible scholars? What are the key issues for researchers? For editors and reviewers? How do institutional leaders influence behaviors? Read more in the editorial, “It Takes a Village: Ethical Publishing of Family Business Research,” in Family Business Review.