In early 2019 COPE, with the support of Routledge (part of the Taylor & Francis Group), commissioned primary research with Shift Learning to better understand the publication ethics landscape for editors working on journals within the arts, humanities, and social sciences. The research used a two-stage methodology: first exploring the issues qualitatively via two online focus groups with a diverse group of arts, humanities, and social sciences journal editors, before creating and disseminating an online survey. This is COPE's first survey to identify publication ethics issues specifically for Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (AHSS) journals. Survey findings
Completed by more than 650 journal editors (not solely COPE members), the study showed the following key findings:
- 64% of respondents encountered issues addressing language and writing quality barriers while seeking to remain inclusive.
- 58% reported detecting plagiarism as the most serious issue they dealt with, followed by fraudulent submissions (44%) and data or image fabrication (31%).
- Recognising and dealing with bias in peer reviewer comments was an issue encountered by 55% of journal editors.
- Journal editors felt least confident in dealing with data and/or image fabrication issues (24%), fraudulent submissions (23%), and intellectual property and copyright issues (21%).
The report takes you through the study methodology, its findings on issues identified by the 650 editors who responded, and their awareness of COPE and our resources.
In the appendices, we break down responses for each of the eight broad subject categories: Arts; Business, Economics and Finance; Education; Humanities; Law; Library and Information Science; Multi and Interdisciplinary; and Social Sciences to show which issues they each rated as most serious, frequent, and prevalent - and those they felt least confident addressing.
The study also compares the responses of our AHSS respondents to those of STM journals in a study by Wager et al in 2009.
There is the opportunity to build on these research findings by sharing your feedback.
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26 February 2020
Update to the pdf re: subject areas included in the broad categories, and a category name. Changes as follows:
Page 26: the Humanities category should include the subject Media, Communication and Cultural Studies (currently under Information Sciences on page 27)
On page 27: As above, the only subject in the category Information Sciences should now be Library and Information Sciences
On page 31: the category called Libraries and Information Technology should be Information Sciences (the n 22 is correct).
FI, the numbers are correct, just the category subjects/ and name need amending.