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Research Guide
Guidelines for Social Science Research
- All research endeavors should be beneficial for human society and promote peace and harmony among the collaborating researchers and partners. Sensitive issues to a culture or a specific society that may cause arousal of aggression, disharmony, or other inappropriate acts may be avoided.
- Respect should be given to human beings, their native language, and cultural values and traditions. There is no good or bad culture.
- Collaborative research should be encouraged at the national and international levels to promote networking among the members and their countries. IESSA appreciates the formation of research groups within a country or across the countries, and they should be a source of learning, professional development, and enhancement of research skills.
- Approval from an Institutional Review Board (IRB) or a Research Ethics Committee (REC) should be sought before executing research that involves human participants, and it should be described in the report. It should be reported that participants were engaged in the study after gaining written informed consent and that their identity will not be disclosed at any time in the future.
- The participants’ personal or professional life should not be at risk due to their involvement in the research. Any sensitive data must be reported with the utmost care, anonymity, and confidentiality, particularly in qualitative studies, where researchers work very closely with the participants.
- Permission should be sought from the parents or guardians of young children who are to be involved in the research.
- The issues such as data manipulation, plagiarism, undue credit given to authors not practically contributing to a manuscript, misuse of images, audio, video recordings, or exploiting the personal information of the participants and other such unethical practices should not be compromised. The images, audios, and videos are prohibited and considered highly unethical if they are subject to forging or adjusted in any form.
- Plagiarism and manipulation of data such as images and audio or video recordings should be treated strictly with a zero-tolerance policy. Plagiarism is defined as producing or re-producing a text, data in any form or idea without appropriate citation of the sources. The researchers should avoid self-plagiarized content that is not appropriately cited and/or substantially re-produced.
- An individual is qualified as an author if he/she had sustainably contributed to research in terms of conceptualization of the research problem, design of the research, data collection, analysis, presentation, revision, editing, or drafting of the manuscript.
- The authors should reveal their personal interests, benefits, or relationships that could unethically affect the authorship or evaluation of the research. Conflict of interests may occur in the form of financial gains such as a monetary grant, scholarship, funding, paid position or employment, and non-monetary benefits such as promoting personal relationships, professional development, promotions, or up-gradation in the job status.