Situation
Jenny Diaz, a junior professor up for Fourth Year Tenure review, is anxious about her publication record, despite an excellent research project underway and contemplates the offer of two journals to report separately on separate parts of her research. The research forms part of a multi-year longitudinal data collection project; about half the time period is completed, however, there are two years left before a final follow-up survey results are complete. Completion of two articles would strengthen her tenure file but could compromise findings as well as shared results for two dissertation students employed on the project.
Questions
- What is the principal ethical issue here? multiple publications? whether or not publication should await full findings of the research, or whether the research should be reported as preliminary findings or simply published without reference to any possible future changes in the questions?
- Is the decision about multiple publications is a community decision, of one to be made by the individual researcher or PI?
Discussion
Several questions can be raised about both the question of multiple submissions of research and reporting of early findings. First, in principal, researchers should not make multiple submissions to scholarly journals, except where policies permit. In any case, writers are obligated under ethics rules to advise journals of the consideration for publication of articles drawn from the same research projects. Many young researchers, however, face the problem of time delays and rejections of articles submitted for publication at a time when pressures are high in the tenure process. Journals are required also to inform scholars in a timely way that articles are accepted or not for publications. Despite the best of efforts, delays occur because reviewers may be difficult to enlist and once gotten, they do not always complete reviews in a timely manner. Second, the reporting of early findings violates ethical principles of full reporting under certain conditions, including when they are based on incomplete enumeration of relevant data, project specification against use of preliminary data analyses, and when the reporting might impair completion of data collection and subsequent publications. If articles are written for publication before the research has been completed, extreme care should be taken to describe the exact nature of the data on which the early findings are based, and when appropriate anticipate possible changes in the final results. Third, if the early reporting of findings might make it difficult for other project participants to use and publish from the same data, then all relevant parties should concur prior to publishing early findings. If graduate students are allowed to use data for theses and dissertations, they should also be allowed to publish these same data, though it may be anticipated that the data will be used in later publications stemming from the project, with proper acknowledgment of the theses.
