Abstract

The growing importance of scientific publications of quality, their impact on society in general and on authors’ processes of scientific recognition, as well as journals needing to have international visibility, may increase the number of conflicts of interests among editors, authors and reviewers of scientific publications. The aim of this article is to review recommendations of existing ethics codes. Major international initiatives, their sponsoring entities and specific recommendations made to the different agents of the process are analyzed. The review reveals that the degree of awareness about the ethics of the publications in each discipline and each country depends on tradition, associations, the established reputation and the degree of internationalization of the journals that make up each scientific field.

Abstract

The presence of ethical guidelines in the instructions for authors and reviewers from 214 journals indexed in the Education and Educational Research category of the 2014 edition of the Journal Citation Reports is analyzed. Content and thematic analysis methodology has been followed to examine the presence of topics regarding ethics of scholarly publishing and research. According to the results, 11.2% of the analyzed journals do not include mentions of any ethical topic and the presence of the various subjects studied differs among the rest. The most frequent are criteria for determining plagiarism (63.01%) and duplicate publication (67.12%). Ethical responsibilities of reviewers (7.76%) and sanctions for misconduct (3.20%) have a low presence.