Ethics when conducting research

Our actions should be guided by the ethics of participating in the scientific community. This means:

• Prioritizing our professional obligations over fear of being “scooped.” For instance, it is unacceptable to interfere with the peer-review process for a paper out of concern of protecting one’s own work (i.e., “sitting” on a review for it, making unreasonable requests to delay publication, and so on.)
• When other researchers request assistance with software developed in the lab, we should attempt to make a best effort to assist them. It is not unreasonable to ask for authorship, particularly if the collaboration is extensive.
• Provide citations to all software that assisted in the development of the scholarly work. In general it is acceptable to cite the layers of software in the analysis stack (e.g., NumPy, Matplotlib, IPython/Jupyter, Fatiando, etc.)
• Citations to data sources (DOIs and publications) should be made wherever possible, and where not possible, should be included as footnotes.
• Plagiarism is unacceptable in any form. This includes “first pass” text included in papers or proposals. If including text from an external source, it must be clearly marked as such to ensure it is not accidentally included in the final product.