In this talk, the present Swedish work for good research practice will be presented, with an emphasis on the work of The National Board for Investigating Misconduct (Npof) and that of The Swedish Association for Higher Learning Institutions (SUHF). Some outstanding issues, tensions and possible future developments will be noted for discussion.

This paper centres on ethics in arts and humanities research that aspires to address pressing societal challenges in collaboration with others. In this contribution, I reflect on ethical demands and implications for training the next generation of language scientists by drawing on two settings of my recent collaborative inquiry: 1) ETHER: an inter-disciplinary network of academics (linguistics, education, curatorial studies, architecture, philosophy, political sciences, etc.), arts organisations, and practitioners sharing and examining frameworks for encountering difference (cf. Kubanyiova & Shetty, forthcoming; Shetty & Kubanyiova, 2022); 2) ethnographic fieldwork in a complex ideological landscape of rural Slovakia with a history of conflict between its ethnic majority population and its stigmatised and spatially segregated Romani-speaking minority (Kubanyiova, 2023; Kubanyiova, Herxheimer, & Koptová, 2023). I distinguish between ethics brought to practice vs. ethics forged through practice (Sadeghi-Yekta & Prendergast, 2022) and show how attending to the former matters but does not, in itself, lead to inherently ‘good’ research. I discuss ethical implications for researcher training in relation to both doing and disseminating research. 

Kubanyiova, M. (2023, March). Encountering the Other in places of stigma: Towards aesthetics as a sociolinguistic research praxis. Paper presented at the American Association for Applied Linguistics, Portland.  

Kubanyiova, M., Herxheimer, S., & Koptová, A. (2023). Under the big tree: Šuňiben kamibnaha. https://www.flipsnack.com/SarahJaneMason/under-the-big-tree-u-iben-kamibnaha-xmlv59uo7k.html 

Kubanyiova, M., & Shetty, P. (forthcoming). Listening without borders: Creating spaces for encountering difference. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. 

Sadeghi-Yekta, K., & Prendergast, M. (2022). Introduction: Being together. In K. Sadeghi-Yekta & M. Prendergast (Eds.), Applied theatre: Ethics (pp. 3-16). London: Bloomsbury. 

Shetty, P., & Kubanyiova, M. (2022). ETHER Podcast: Encountering through storytelling - whose stories? Retrieved from https://ether.leeds.ac.uk/ether-resource-library/ether-podcast-series/ 

Questionable research practices (QRPs) are researcher actions that occur along a continuum between actions deemed fully ethical and those that clearly violate ethical norms (Artino et al., 2018; Fanelli, 2009). Though surveys have found that a majority of applied linguists have engaged in QRPs in their careers (Isbell et al., 2022; Larsson et al., 2023), the degree of (un)ethicality of these decisions may be dependent on the context in which they are made. This talk explores the context-dependent nature of QRPs through a thematic analysis of comments left by quantitative humanities researchers on a survey ranking the frequency and severity of QRP items. Findings point to a need for ethical and methodological training that highlights the day-to-day decision making processes that quantitative researchers encounter.

There is nothing inherently wrong with referring to one’s own work. However, frequent self-citation might be seen as gratuitous, self-serving, and even unethical (e.g., Ioannidis, 2015). In applied linguistics, Plonsky et al. (in press) identified ‘excessive self-citation’ as one of 58 potentially questionable research practices (QRPs), but few of the participants in Larsson et al.’s (2023) survey reported engaging in this practice. Is this really the case? To address this question, we have collected a large and representative sample of published applied linguistics research to be coded for references to the authors’ work. Without calling out individual scholars, we will explore self-citation patterns overall as well as in relation to different author- and study-level characteristics. 

Beyond the obvious types of data fraud such as fabrication and falsification, this talk discusses more subtle places in the practice of quantitative methods where ethical issues and decision points arise, and in turn the opportunities for more principled training of quantitative researchers.