The expert Talk was organised for LLM. BALL.B IX, BBALL.B IX & Ph.D. Scholars of the Faculty of Law. Under the Legal Manthan, an Academic Association of Students , Faculty of Law, SGT University organized Virtual Expert Talk on “Importance of Research &Publication Ethics for Academic Integrity” on 19th January,2022 from 11 AM onwards. The guest speaker was Prof. (Dr.) Partha Pratim Mitra, Professor, School of Law, Galgotias University, on behalf of the entire Faculty of Law, SGT University. The welcome address was given by Prof (Dr.) Sanjay Kumar Pandey, Dean, Faculty of Law. The event was moderated by Dr.Mahalingam, Associate Professor from the Faculty of Law was the convener of the event.
Professor Mitra, started the lecture by emphasising on the importance of research for every student for that matter. After quoting the reports of 2020, he brought to the notice of the audience that out of as many as 300 universities, not even a single Indian university could make a mark in the field of international research, because we lack in maintaining the standard of competition with those western countries. The issue identified by the UGC is that Indian researches does not match, or rather we lack the ethical standards, and therefore there is a need for some basic standards to maintain “academic integrity”.
Professor Mitra also explained his thoughts and concepts with the help of a power point presentation. According to him, there must be a moral responsibility behind every invention. There should be moral regulations that ought to regulate a researcher, and the researcher should not go beyond those ethics in any manner. He also quoted Justice J.S. Verma, who had also emphasised the need for every research to be ethics oriented, and above all the need for educational ethics.
Our guest speaker also explained the thin line difference between ethics and morality, and showed us how the two concepts are rather similar. He stated that while ethics is the name of the subject, it is an external matter, while morality is an internal matter. Giving examples from life of Abraham Lincoln, he explained that, while a person may be ethically correct, but he may not be morally correct also. Therefore summarily, every researcher should follow rules to maintain ethics, which will lead to honesty and will ultimately lead to academic integrity.
Through this lecture, we also got to understand various international protocols and declarations in the light of research ethics, like the Nuremberg Code, which is the first example of ethical codes in the modern history, then the three pillars of research mentioned in the Belmont Report, Cartagena Protocol on Bio-Safety, and the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing. All these declarations and protocols indicate to one fact that whenever a human being, or a biological element is the present on research, the researcher is subject to research ethics. The fact that how to maintain this academic integrity was also stressed upon the speaker, and the first rule that comes up is to eliminate plagiarism, after which there is a need to maintain scientific conduct, and eliminate scientific misconduct. Also, there is need for elimination of redundant publication, which doesn’t develop or enlarge the research activity.
The lecture further continued with the need for citation after publication, because it is rather more important that a research paper is cited, and known to, and referred by others. Acknowledgment of others work indicates honesty of every intellectual, and will ultimately bring academic integrity.
The enlightening lecture ended with the findings of Justice Deepak Mishra, that research is the biggest area for any country to mark its place in international research arena. It is that even after having numerous NLUs in the country, India fails to make a recognisable space in legal research. With this the guest lecture requested everyone to be intellectually honest and thereby bring academic integrity.
After this the platform was opened for an interesting question and answer session by our convener, Dr. M. Mahalingam. Certain interesting questions were asked, as to how to identify a predatory journal by a researcher, to which the stress was laid down by the speaker upon checks trough SCOPUS and identification of fake websites. Lastly, a vote of thanks was proposed by Dr.Rakesh Kumari Malik .
