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Case Study

Diagnose the ethical issue in Dr. Chen's approach. Explain why her actions constitute an ethical breach and how they mislead the scientific community.

Case context: Dr. Sarah Chen conducts a study on the relationship between sleep hygiene and academic stress. She publishes the findings and the corresponding dataset in a prominent developmental psychology journal. The following semester, she submits the exact same dataset to an educational psychology journal under a new title and a newly drafted introduction, without referencing or acknowledging the first publication, in order to show that her research has been replicated.

Question: Diagnose the ethical issue in Dr. Chen's approach. Explain why her actions constitute an ethical breach and how they mislead the scientific community.

Sample answer: Dr. Chen has committed duplicate data publication by publishing the same dataset a second time and presenting it as new, original research. This action is a breach of scholarly integrity because it distorts the scientific literature by making a single finding appear as two independent replications. This misleadingly amplifies the apparent impact of her findings and falsely suggests stronger empirical support for her hypothesis than exists.

Key points:

  • Diagnose the scenario as duplicate data publication.
  • Explain that presenting old data as new without citation violates scholarly integrity.
  • Describe how the action distorts the body of scientific literature.
  • Explain how the action misleadingly amplifies the impact of a single set of findings.

Rubric: The learner should diagnose the issue as duplicate data publication. They must explain that Dr. Chen presented the same dataset as new research without referencing the original publication, and clarify that this distorts scientific literature and misleadingly inflates the weight/impact of a single set of findings.

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Updated 2026-05-26

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Research Methods in Psychology - 4th American Edition @ KPU

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