Guidelines for Dealing with Cases of Ethical bad Practices in Academic Journals of Social Sciences and Humanities

Within academic publications, bad practiceshave become a recurrent and complex issue for publishing institutions and agents, since their conceptual boundaries are in constant debate. The objective of this article is to propose the bases of a protocol for academic/administrative action, which integrates the rights and ethical obligations of authors and publishers. The guidelines of action are established before a possible suspicion or violation of rights of author (academic plagiarism); duplicate or redundant publications; “self-plagiarism”; manufacture, falsification or invention of data; conflicts of authorship, among others. The analysis presented is the result of a documentary investigation based on national and international guidelines of academic publications. This proposal seeks to contribute to the construction of a model that helps visualize “bad practices” that may arise. Two flowcharts that exemplify the operationalization of the proposed protocol are included.