Philosophy and Ethics
•    Introduction to philosophy: definition; nature & scope; concept; branches
•    Ethics: definition; moral philosophy; nature of moral judgements & reactions

•    Ethics with respect to science & research, group discussion on subject specific ethical issues
•    Intellectual honesty & research integrity
•    Scientific misconducts: falsification, fabrication, & plagiarism (FPP), group discussion on subject specific FPP issues
•    Redundant publications: duplicate & overlapping publications, salami slicing
•    Selective reporting & misrepresentation of data 6

•    Publication ethics: definition, introduction & importance
•    Best practices/standard setting initiative & guidelines: COPE, WAME etc
•    Conflicts of interest, group discussions on conflicts of interest
•    Publication misconducts: definition, concept, problems that lead to unethical behaviour & vice versa, types
•    Violation of publication ethics, authorship & contributor-ship, group discussion on subject specific authorship issues  
•    Identification of publication misconduct, complaints & appeals, group discussion on examples and fraud from India & abroad
•    Predatory Publishers & journals    7

Open Access Publishing
•    Open access publications & initiatives SHERPA/RoMEO online resource to check publisher copyright & self-archiving policies
•    Journal finder/journal suggestion tools viz. JANE, Elsevier Journal Finder, Springer Journal Suggester etc.
•    Software tools developed by SPPU to identify predatory publications
•    Software tools: use of plagiarism software like Turnitin, Urkund, and other open source software tools
   

Databases & Research Metrics
Databases (3 hrs)
•    Indexing databases
•    Citation databases: Web of Science, Scopus, etc.

Research Metrics (3 hrs)
•    Impact Factor of journal as per Journal Citation Report, SNIP, SJR, IPP, Cite Score
•    Metrics: h-index, g index, i10 index, altmetrics