ICT Based Research Activities: Ethical Awareness & Applications by the Contemporary Researchers

Abstract

Research ethics are quite familiar and are followed by the researchers in all research institutes all over the world. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are the major source of collecting, saving, analyzing and disseminating the results of these researches in all over world as well. Therefore, the major question is that whether ICT-Ethics/IT Ethics are also being followed by these researchers during their research work or not? To answer this question, a self-developed questionnaire was administered amongst the contemporary researchers of one of the main public sector University of Southern Punjab. Four factors related to ICT ethics were mainly asked in this questionnaire: Basic Understanding with ICT ethics; Grabbing Data Online; Copyright Acts and Plagiarism. Total 200 (97 male and 103 female) researchers of session 2016-18 participated in this research on the basis of their willingness. With the help of graphs, frequencies, average scores and percentages it was concluded that overall all sampled researchers’ knowledge falls under the category of ‘Average to Above Average’ in all factors of ICT based research ethics which were specifically observed in this study. By comparing results gender-wise; it was found that both categories fall under the category of ‘Below Average to Average’ knowledge; but values disclosed that female researchers’ knowledge was better than to male researchers.