Unit 1

Ethics in Research
Ethics, moral philosophy, nature of moral judgements and reactions. Scientific conduct – ethics with respect to science and research. Intellectual honesty and research integrity. Scientific misconducts – falsification, fabrication and plagiarism. Redundant publications – duplicate and overlapping publications. Selective reporting and misrepresentation of data.

Unit 2

Literature Survey
Importance of literature survey, planning a literature search, identifying key concepts and key words, locating relevant literature and reliability of a source.

Unit 3

Design of Experiments and Data Analysis
Aim, objectives, expected outcome, and methodology to be adopted. Importance of reproducibility of results. Objectives and basic principles of designs of experiments. Data presentation – using graphs, in tables, schemes and figures. Software for drawing. Bibliography using Mendeley and Zotero.

Unit 4

Publication Ethics
Best practices and standards, conflicts of interest, publication misconduct, unethical behaviour and related problems. Authorship and contributorship. Identification of publication misconduct, complaints and appeals.

Unit 5

Research Communication
General aspects of scientific writing – reporting practical and project work, writing literature survey and reviews, organizing a poster display, oral presentation. Guidelines for manuscript writing – abstract, introduction, methodology, results and discussion, conclusion, acknowledgement, references and citation. Intellectual property (IP) and intellectual property rights (IPR).

1. Bird, A., 2006. Philosophy of science. Routledge.
2. MacIntyre, A., 2017. A short history of ethics: A history of moral philosophy from the Homeric age to the twentieth century. University of Notre Dame Pess.
3. Chaddah, P., 2018. Ethics in Competitive Research: Do not get scooped; do not get plagiarized.
4. Bordens, K.S. and Abbott, B.B., 2002. Research design and methods: A process approach. McGraw-Hill.
5. Kothari C.R., 2020. Research methodology methods and Techniques. New Age International Publishers.
6. Thomas, C.G., 2021. Research methodology and scientific writing. Thrissur: Springer.