Scientific journals must be alert to potential manipulation in citations and referencing

Citation is an essential practice in scientific publishing. However, it is mandatory that citing the sources in a scientific work is performed in a proper manner. Manipulating citations in research articles is one form of academic research misconduct that violates publication ethics. Citation manipulation simply occurs for the purpose of increasing the number of citations of a researcher or a journal. Unfortunately, there has been a growing trend for this type of misconduct recently and this has not received much attention from the science community. The most effective solution to prevent the growth of such unethical practices is for reputable journals to impose stricter rules on reference evaluation criteria in order to emphasize on the appropriateness of the citations.

COVID-19 denial in Turkmenistan veiling the real situation

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) emerged in late 2019, with the first case identified in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China, on 12 December 2019. In order to perceive the comprehensive impact of this pandemic, we have to know that misinformation and denials about COVID-19 have surely exacerbated its diffusion and hindered the response against it. Turkmenistan remains one of the very few countries in the world that lacks reports about emerging cases of the novel coronavirus. Turkmen authorities claim that they have adopted all attainable measures required in order to combat the virus, asserting that COVID-19 has yet to reach their country. Despite the government’s reported absence of COVID-19 in the country, rumors, media reports and independent sources suggest the spread of the pandemic in Turkmenistan. By mid-June 2020, the outbreak was referred to as being serious with patients suffering extreme health risks, and following its state of disrepair and unethical practices, many of those anticipated to be COVID-19 infected tend to suffer at home, discouraging any interaction with the healthcare system. The civil society in Turkmenistan, for the time being, takes full part of the government’s duty in the process of informing and educating the public regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, and endeavors to keep the government and WHO accountable for behaving in such repressive ways that could lead to rather preventable loss of human life in Turkmenistan. Yet, efforts hang fire before unveiling the real situation, and Turkmenistan’s government owning up to the negations and roaming speculations, not only regarding the coronavirus crisis, but every public-related issue itself.

Socially Responsible Target Marketing and Marketing Communications – Concerns and Initiatives

Companies are in business to generate revenues and profits and achieve business excellence. Now-a-days, companies are becoming sensitive towards their social responsibilities of ensuring not only consumer welfare but also the welfare of all stakeholders including the society at large. Companies do target marketing and marketing communications to communicate about their offerings to target markets. They adopt socially responsible target marketing, marketing communications, and advertising campaigns. Various issues in advertising campaigns include deceptive advertising, and unethical practices in fashion advertising and in cosmetics industry. Companies adopt advertising campaigns for social causes, socially responsible sales promotion, and personal selling. Companies should ensure consumer privacy, safety, and security. Various stakeholders want to be assured that businesses care about their welfare. Businesses should ensure consumer welfare and welfare of the society at large. This will allow them to achieve business excellence and stay ahead in the competition.

Outsourcing and the strategy of organizations in Mexico

Outsourcing has been a very commonly used strategy to increase productivity in a variety of organizations. In Mexico, it can be said that it has had a positive impact on employment rate. Nevertheless, there is a “dark side” in this strategy, since it has been used as a way to avoid direct hiring of employees and to evade fiscal and social security regulations. This document aims to analyze outsourcing from a regulatory and contractual approach, as well as its role as a way to increase the employment rate, and from a managerial perspective. As a result of this analysis, it was found that in our country outsourcing has been a successfully used strategy by many organizations of different sizes, but at the same time, the lack of an appropriate legislation has originated a series of unethical practices. In Mexico, in 2021 a new legal framework that tries to balance the relationship between firms and employees was approved. This paper ends with a reflection of the possible impacts of this new legislation.

Deciphering dimensions of overlapping publications

Proving research efficiency and academic growth by the number of publications flag the researchers to publish more articles from a single dataset. They are crossing into unethical practices such as self-plagiarism, duplicate publication, and other research misconducts, which warrant disciplinary action against them. The thrust of this review is to draw the attention of the authors, reviewers, editors, and readers toward different dimensions of overlapping publications in research. Various guidelines and ethical bodies such as Committee on Publication Ethics and International Committee of Medical Journal Editors were considered for the review. The present review provides an expansive outline of publication overlap available in the literature. The reasons for conducting and problems associated with different types of overlapping publications are identified. Preventive and remedial measures as well as recommendations for authors, editors, and reviewers have been highlighted. Because of the strain to “publish or perish” from the researchers’ end, journals are ending up being flooded with overlapping publications.

Consequences of Growth at Freedom AV Life Insurance

The case deals with ethical issues in marketing in a larger context encountered while managing channels. Freedom AV Life Insurance, established in 2002, was a laggard in terms of revenue generation among private life insurers in the country. A new CEO, Ramesh Ramachandran, was hired to improve revenues, which drastically improved post his joining and upon on him hiring a new sales head. However, customer grievances multiplied, and Rajesh Bhardwaj, the customer services head, was questioned by the CEO and was asked to submit an action plan to stem the rising complaints. Bhardwaj felt this was the result of mis-selling by agents and the salesforce of the company. Bhardwaj proposed a solution by emailing the sales head. Just as he had finished writing the mail, he was surprised to find a new mail from the CEO asking him to prepare a presentation before the company’s board of directors in two days. At the end of the case, Bhardwaj becomes engulfed with self-doubt and anxiety on what to present before the board members. The case deals with ethical issues in marketing financial products like life insurance and looks at solutions to the practice of mis-selling financial services. Students would attempt to find answers to the question of whether they can achieve sales goals without resorting to unethical practices.

THE ROLE OF ETHICAL LEADERSHIP AND WHISTLEBLOWING INTENTIONS: MEDIATING APPARATUS OF MORAL IDENTITY

Separation of strategic approaches and morals prompted various business outrages and untrustworthy practices in working environments. This encouraged researchers and practice holders to examine significance of ethical quality at work environment. In particular, the job that moral chiefs play in advancing positive representative practices is urgent. This examination article has featured the part of moral innovators in molding whistleblowing goals of their subordinates. Alongside, this exploration article has likewise researched the part of good character. An aggregate of four speculations, analyzing the immediate impact of moral initiative on moral personality and whistleblowing expectations and meditational job of good character were proposed. This exploration article embraced a period slacked research article plan and gathered data from representative friend dyads at three focuses on schedule. Number of respondents was 214; Cross-sectional technique was used for data collection. Respondents were selected from different services organizations from Multan. Data was analysed on SPSS and AMOS. Results were obtained by applying reliability test, ANOVA, Correlation test, and regression test by using PROCESS Macro. Results gained verified that the role of ethical leaders in shaping moral identity of employees as well as their whistleblowing intentions. The findings suggest that employees working under ethical leaders are inclined to stand up against malevolent and unethical practices taking place at their workplace. Thus, organizations must hire leaders with higher ethical inclinations and also train the existing leaders about importance of ethics. Moreover, this research article has highlighted multiple avenues for future research.

Electronic fraud: an emerging cause of bank failure in Nigerian deposit money banks

Purpose This study aims to review the degree to which fraud and other unethical practices especially in the digital space have affected the Nigerian banking industry both in the past and present, and how it will be a growing concern in the imminent future. The objective of the study was to examine the impact of electronic fraud on the quality of assets and return on assets of Nigerian deposit money banks. Design/methodology/approach The research used secondary data for the periods 2006 till 2018, which were collected from the Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation annual reports. Descriptive analysis and the ordinary least square method of regression analysis were used for data analysis. Findings Findings revealed that electronic fraud cases increased progressively over most of the years of study, which can be attributed to the increased bank products that are electronic-based. Originality/value Many of the reviewed literature examined electronic fraud and its impact on bank profitability but this study examined the cause of electronic fraud and what can be done to curtail it.

Determinants of Consumer Perceptions of the Ethics of Online Retailers: An Investigation Using Confirmatory Factor Analysis

Though the online retailing ethics literature has been growing steadily, no research has attempted to examine the myriad aspects and concerns about the online retailers’ unethical practices and behaviours. The study aims to extend the research and re-validate the consumer perception of ethics of online retailers (CPEOR) scale in the Indian context. The methodology involves an exploratory factor analysis on a sample of 261 online shopper responses on a 7-point Likert scale. The obtained scale was then validated on a new sample of 416 users using confirmatory factor analysis. The research identifies and validates 10 factors that influence CPEOR, that is, privacy, security, non-deception, fulfilment, customer service, service recovery, fairness concerns, environmental concerns, corporate social responsibility and ethical policies. The study offers valuable insights to the managers and researchers. The study offers best practices in the different dimensions of CPEOR along with future research directions. The study provides unified and comprehensive insights on CPEOR by examining all possible dimensions of CPEOR.

Use of Force Account Procurement Method for Development of Small and Medium Contracting Firms in Mbeya

The study investigates on the value of using force account procurement method in development of small and medium contracting firms. To explicitly reveal what is behind the scene three objectives were formulated which were:-to examine the features of force account in procurement undertakings; to determine the value behind force account procurement method in procurement process towards development of SME and; to assess the bottleneck over effective enforcement of force account policy. The target population being (30) contractors, engineers and technicians employed with TANROADs, TARURA, TANESCO, and REA and those self employed (37) in Mbeya. Snow ball sampling technique was used to obtain a total of 67 respondents deduced. The semi-structured intereview and checklists schedules being used to gather the facts then descriptively and through the use of simple frequencies and percentage the reality was revealed:- force accounts involves local contractors by 100% executing contracts defined under force account policy to its end. Moreover force account is 100% local community participation procurement regularities; force account increases competence (70%); experience (66%) and financial capacitating (59%) of local contractors. Furthermore it was revealed that though projects assigned under force account are to be executed by indigenous contractors by 100% but from the field area it was found only 50% to be sustained. This gap of >50% of contracts under force account none executed was revealed to be caused by technical deficiency given the wilks’ lambda, λ<0.9; management incompetence given -X<5.0 and δ2>0.05; cases over (unethical practices reported >60%; financial difficulties >54.7%; and tax burden >60%).