Introduction to philosophy: definition; nature & scope; concept; branches
Ethics: definition; moral philosophy; nature of moral judgements & reactions
Ethics with respect to science & research, group discussion on subject specific ethical issues
Intellectual honesty & research integrity
Scientific misconducts: falsification, fabrication, & plagiarism (FPP), group discussion on subject specific FPP issues
Redundant publications: duplicate & overlapping publications, salami slicing
Selective reporting & misrepresentation of data
Publication ethics: definition, introduction & importance
Best practices/standard setting initiative & guidelines: COPE, WAME etc
Conflicts of interest, group discussions on conflicts of interest
Publication misconducts: definition, concept, problems that lead to unethical behaviour & vice versa, types
Violation of publication ethics, authorship & contributor-ship, group discussion on subject specific authorship issues
Identification of publication misconduct, complaints & appeals, group discussion on examples and fraud from India & abroad. Predatory Publishers & journals
Open access publications & initiatives SHERPA/RoMEO online resource to check publisher copyright & self-archiving policies
Journal finder/journal suggestion tools viz. JANE, Elsevier Journal Finder, Springer Journal Suggester etc.
Software tools developed by SPPU to identify predatory publications
Software tools: use of plagiarism software like Turnitin, Urkund, and other open source software tools
Databases & Research Metrics Databases (3 hrs)
Indexing databases
Citation databases: Web of Science, Scopus, etc.
Research Metrics (3 hrs)
Impact Factor of journal as per Journal Citation Report, SNIP, SJR, IPP, Cite Score
Metrics: h-index, g index, i10 index, altmetrics