Ethical and Responsible Behavior in Applied Empirical Research: Four Essays on Academic Practices in the Social Sciences

In a world filled with fake news and alternative facts, public trust in science is of utmost importance. Yet scandals like the cases of Diederik Stapel and Ulrich Lichtenthaler have questioned the integrity of scholars and their research results. To address this issue, several scientists investigated academic (mal)practices like plagiarism, HARKing, authorship misuse and data flexibility. The results were devastating and ignited a credibility crisis, especially in the social sciences. Fortunately, we already can see the light at the end of the tunnel as editors, publishers, research societies and universities have started to introduce techniques and infrastructure that ensure ethical and responsible scholarly behavior. For example, artificial intelligence has enabled plagiarism detection software to not only check for copy-pasting but also for content and reference similarities. Moreover, more and more journals motivate or sometimes even require researchers to pre-register their research hypotheses prior to data collection and/or data analysis to prevent HARKing. In the life sciences, contribution disclosure statements force authors to transparently report the contributions of each researcher involved in a research project. In the social sciences, several articles and editorials highlighted that ensuring replicability by means of transparent reporting and data sharing allows detecting and overcoming flexible and questionable data handling practices.
This thesis builds upon the existing body of literature and provides guidance for those academic (mal)practices that have been covered only rudimentarily in the social sciences.