Publishing ethics
Even when scientific misconduct is unintentional, breaking the publishing ethics rules can badly damage your reputation as a researcher. As an author, it is your responsibility to ensure that you publish ethically and maintain the standards of academic publishing.
Elsevier’s Researcher Academy offers expert ethics advice and guidance, including training, webcasts, videos and interviews.
Ethics toolkit factsheets
Elsevier has also developed a number of Ethics Factsheets designed to help you navigate potential ethics pitfalls. Topics covered include:
- Duplicate submission. This occurs when an author submits a paper to different publications at the same time. As a result, the paper may appear in multiple journals.
- Research fraud. Falls into two broad categories: 1) Fabrication - making up research data and results and recording or reporting them, and 2) Falsification - manipulating research materials, images, data, equipment, or processes.
- Plagiarism. One of the most common types of publication misconduct, it occurs when an author deliberately uses another’s work without permission, credit, or acknowledgment.|
- Authorship. The term ‘author’ is generally agreed to describe someone who has made a significant intellectual contribution to the study. Deliberately excluding an author, or adding someone who does not meet the criteria, is considered a form of misconduct.
- Conflict of interests. As an article author, it is essential to be transparent about competing commitments, interests or loyalties.
- Salami slicing. This term describes the ‘slicing’ of research that would form one meaningful paper into several different papers.
>> Download the factsheets from Elsevier’s policies and ethics page