Questionable Research Practices (QRPs) are often viewed as the “murky waters” of research ethics and cover practices that fall between ideal behavior and absolute misconduct (e.g., falsification). Whether intentional or not, researchers make choices that may lead them to engage in QRPs; for example, with limited time to edit a manuscript, a researcher might opt to leave out some detailed information in the methods section instead of shaving off words in the discussion. This talk reports on a recent survey aiming to investigate (i) what types of QRPs and related ethical considerations researchers in the quantitative humanities in Sweden and the U.S. have encountered and (ii) the perceived severity of these QRPs.

We will discuss the past, present, and future of research ethics training material for the quantitative humanities. We cover themes that emerged from a timeline of research ethics in applied linguistics, discuss the results of a project looking at how research ethics is currently represented in syllabi and research methods textbooks, and then have an open conversation with the audience about their needs, wants, and ideas for improving research ethics training materials. The information provided in this session will help us to create research ethics training materials for the quantitative humanities. 

The many tasks associated with journal editing are often laden with ethical dimensions and corresponding decisions. However, such decisions—and the deliberations made by journal editors—are very rarely visible to the field at large or even to the scholars they might affect. Furthermore, in many instances, the choices facing journal editors fall into an ethical gray area and may not even be recognized as pertaining to ethics at all. In this presentation, we aim to shed light on the ethics involved in journal editing. We also aim to problematize some of the personal experiences we have had as editors and to discuss what we perceived the ethical issues to be. In addition, we will describe a set of situations we have encountered from our experience as editors of Studies in Second Language Acquisition that carried ethical dimensions along with our justifications for our decisions. We conclude by laying out what we see as several paths forward and toward more equitable and less ethically fraught editing for linguistics and other social sciences.

Scholars in the field of applied linguistics increasingly adopt open science practices. The field seems to be witnessing a gradual transition towards open access publication and instrument sharing. However, there are also causes for concern, factors that hold our push towards a fully open and transparent science practice back. In this presentation, I would like to explore some such factors by presenting the audience with moral dilemmas about open access publishing and organize a live discussion about the implications of their choices for making progress in open science publication.