Philosophy and Ethics

• Introduction to philosophy: definition; nature & scope; concept; branches
• Ethics: definition; moral philosophy; nature of moral judgements & reactions

Scientific Conduct

• Ethics with respect to science & research, group discussion on subject specific ethical issues
• Intellectual honesty & research integrity
• Scientific misconducts: falsification, fabrication, & plagiarism (FPP), group discussion on subject specific FPP issues
• Redundant publications: duplicate & overlapping publications, salami slicing
• Selective reporting & misrepresentation of data

Publication Ethics

• Publication ethics: definition, introduction & importance
• Best practices/standard setting initiative & guidelines: COPE, WAME etc
• Conflicts of interest, group discussions on conflicts of interest
• Publication misconducts: definition, concept, problems that lead to unethical behaviour & vice versa, types
• Violation of publication ethics, authorship & contributor-ship, group discussion on subject specific authorship issues 
• Identification of publication misconduct, complaints & appeals, group discussion on examples and fraud from India & abroad
• Predatory Publishers & journals

Open Access Publishing

• Open access publications & initiatives SHERPA/RoMEO online resource to check publisher copyright & self-archiving policies
• Journal finder/journal suggestion tools viz. JANE, Elsevier Journal Finder, Springer Journal Suggester etc.
• Software tools developed by SPPU to identify predatory publications
• Software tools: use of plagiarism software like Turnitin, Urkund, and other open source software tools

Databases & Research Metrics

Databases (3 hrs)

• Indexing databases
• Citation databases: Web of Science, Scopus, etc.

Research Metrics (3 hrs)

• Impact Factor of journal as per Journal Citation Report, SNIP, SJR, IPP, Cite Score
• Metrics: h-index, g index, i10 index, altmetrics