Description
In recent years, scholars of IR and political science have called attention to research ethics, as evidenced in calls for journals to require confirmation of ethical clearance prior to publication, demands for further resources and training for scholars, and a proliferation of publications on the topic. The intensification of interest in research ethics calls for closer scrutiny of this emerging area of study and its position in the discipline as a whole. This article conducts a bibliometric analysis of political science and international relations journal articles on research ethics in order to understand how the field generates and values scholarship on research ethics. The findings show that, to date, scholarship on research ethics is disproportionately produced by scholars that are traditionally under-represented in the academy, and that it has been comparatively undervalued in political science and international relations, rarely appearing in the discipline’s top journals and receiving comparatively fewer citations. We further find that much of what has been published on research ethics in political science has not been taken up by the so-called “mainstream”. These findings raise important questions about whose labour the field relies on to produce knowledge on research ethics, how that labour is valued, and the extent to which research ethics reflects a substantive area of inquiry, versus a disciplinary practice demonstrating commitment to ethical research.
