Viewpoint: Beasts of the field? Ethics in agricultural and applied economics

•Changes to research practices and media attention have raise new ethical concerns.•We survey relevant issues and offer a number of proposals to improve the field.•We focus on ethical issues that have emerged in recent years.•Issues discussed include pre-analysis plans, p-hacking, and popular media...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Food policy 2018-08, Vol.79, p.1-11
Main Authors: Josephson, Anna, Michler, Jeffrey D.
Format: Article
Language:eng
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Summary:•Changes to research practices and media attention have raise new ethical concerns.•We survey relevant issues and offer a number of proposals to improve the field.•We focus on ethical issues that have emerged in recent years.•Issues discussed include pre-analysis plans, p-hacking, and popular media attention. Ongoing changes to research practices and recent media attention to agricultural and applied economics have raised new ethical problems, but also created opportunities for new solutions. In this paper, we discuss ethical issues facing the profession and propose potential ways in which the field can address these issues. We divide our discussion into two topics. First are ethical issues that arise during the collection, management and analysis of data. Second are ethical issues faced by researchers as they formulate, fund, and disseminate their research. We pay special attention to issues of data dredging or p-hacking and potential ethical issues arising from interaction with the media.
ISSN:0306-9192
1873-5657