Please see this call for papers at JEBO’s Website here:
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
Special Issue on Interdisciplinary Research Ethics and Norms
Call for Papers
While discipline centric research remains commonplace, recent years have seen an increased focus upon interdisciplinary research and multi-disciplinary research teams. Funding agencies, like the National Science Foundation, have been strongly emphasizing the importance such research.
Such interdisciplinary research endeavors have great potential for scientific discovery as they expose researchers to a wide range of potential research challenges. It also may introduce problems due to differing research norms and ethics that exist within different fields. It is not always clear which norms will govern a research team at each stage of a study. Some research norms, such as the use of deception in human subjects research, are well known to vary dramatically between different social science fields. However, other norms that vary dramatically between different fields are less well known and may only be discovered late into a research relationship, thus stifling the completion of otherwise high-quality studies. These issues can span from differences in requirements for earning a co-authorship spot on a paper (or order of authors on a paper), norm differences in posting of working-papers and giving of presentations, to differences in norms governing how the intellectual property, ideas, and data from one study should be used and credited in future studies.
This special issue aims to gather papers discussing some of the most important hurdles in conducting, publishing, and maintaining quality interdisciplinary research studies and teams doing experimental and behavioral research.
Special issue details:
The focus of the special issue is related to the norms and ethical differences and hurdles associated with behavioral and/or human subjects related interdisciplinary research (lab, online, and field experiments). Quality submissions from other areas will be considered as well if closely connected to the special issue theme and applicable to the focal areas of research. Submitted papers should all be evidence-based, and we welcome a broad range of approaches. For example, submissions could reflect new experimental studies, meta-analyses of existing data, data-based surveys of researchers/teams, or empirical studies exploring characteristics of past published research (like Reuben et al., 2022). In areas where there is a substantial amount of existing research in different disciplines, we also welcome submission of papers that carefully synthesize/review evidence from different fields (such as synthesizing different approaches to addressing subject compensation/stake size that has been discussed previously in different ways – such as Holt and Laury (2002) in economics and Bowen and Kensinger (2017) in psychology).
We encourage the submission of quality papers on a wide range of topics of issues of concern within multi/inter-disciplinary experimental and behavioral research. While not an exclusive list of topic areas, below we provide a list of some particular target areas we are particularly interested in seeing represented. We reference existing papers in each area to provide examples of small set of papers that have explored some of these topics in the past. Potential submitters could consider using similar methodologies to related questions, adding new data where needed, expanding the disciplinary reach and data set of papers to include multiple disciplines, etc.
- Methodological Norms/Problems/Solutions
- Deception and incomplete disclosure
- Subject compensation
- Field experiments and consent
- Pre-registration
- Funding norms
- Sample targeting and/or sample size determination
- Statistical software and analysis methods (Bayesian/Frequentist or Qualitative/Quantitative)
- Consider studies like Logg and Dorison (2021), McDermott and Hatemi (2020), Page et al. (2021), and Ortmann and Hertwig (2002).
- Co-authorship and Publication Norms/Problems/Solutions
- Co-author inclusion, author order, work division
- Pre-publication presentations and working paper posting
- Journal choices, open access publication, and funding
- Intellectual property divisions
- Role/treatment of graduate student/post-doc co-authors/research team members
- Consider papers like Reuben et al. (2022) and papers that bring new data to apply to discussions of existing studies like Smith and Master (2017).
- Research Application Norms/Problems/Solutions (Post-Publication)
- Morals/ethics of industry application
- Morals/ethics of policy/government application
- Conflict of interest, patents/intellectual property, and profiting from research
- Consider studies like King and Persily (2020) and how work like List (2022) is used across different disciplines.
- Unintended Consequences of Inter-disciplinary Compared to Intra-disciplinary Research
- Systematic biases/patterns in topics/samples studied
- Systematic biases/patterns in who conducts studies or receives funding
- Systematic biases/patterns in findings/outcomes
- Gaps/absences in topics/methodologies that are not used/studied or understudied/underused
- Consider studies like Park et al. (2023).
Conference details:
Papers submitted/received by the early submission deadline (December 1st, 2024) can be considered for a presentation at the Interdisciplinary Research Ethics and Norms Conference that is being held at Baylor University on April 25th, 2025 and will be followed immediately, on the 26th, by the annual Texas Experimental Association Symposium. This is a National Science Foundation funded conference that aims to further discuss these important issues and provide feedback to improve the presented papers prior to final decisions and publication in the VSI. Paper presenters will also be eligible for an honorarium to offset the costs of travel and hotel during the conference. Separate honorarium lines are available for faculty and graduate student presenters. As such, we encourage papers co-authored and/or written with/by graduate students as well as junior and senior faculty. More details about the conference can be found at: sites.baylor.edu/irenc25
Submission details:
Early submission deadline to be considered for presentation at the conference: December 1, 2024
General submission deadline: August 31, 2025
Note: Authors are limited to appearing in only one published paper within the special issue (excluding the SI introductory essay).
Editorial team:
Jason A Aimone, Associate Professor of Economics, Baylor University
J. Braxton Gately, Assistant Professor of Economics, School of Accounting, Finance, Economics, and Decision Sciences, Western Illinois University
Abdelaziz Alsharawy, Assistant Professor of Health Economics, Department of Management, Policy, and Community Health, School of Public Health, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth Houston)
References:
Bowen, H. J., & Kensinger, E. A. (2017). Cash or credit? Compensation in psychology studies: Motivation matters. Collabra: Psychology, 3(1), 12.
Holt, C. A., & Laury, S. K. (2002). Risk aversion and incentive effects. American economic review, 92(5), 1644-1655.
King, G., & Persily, N. (2020). A new model for industry–academic partnerships. PS: Political Science & Politics, 53(4), 703-709.
List, J. A. (2022). The voltage effect: How to make good ideas great and great ideas scale. Crown Currency.
Logg, J. M., & Dorison, C. A. (2021). Pre-registration: Weighing costs and benefits for researchers. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 167, 18-27.
McDermott, R., & Hatemi, P. K. (2020). Ethics in field experimentation: A call to establish new standards to protect the public from unwanted manipulation and real harms. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(48), 30014-30021.
Ortmann, A., & Hertwig, R. (2002). The costs of deception: Evidence from psychology. Experimental Economics, 5, 111-131.
Page, L., Noussair, C. N., & Slonim, R. (2021). The replication crisis, the rise of new research practices and what it means for experimental economics. Journal of the Economic Science Association, 7, 210-225.
Park, M., Leahey, E., & Funk, R. J. (2023). Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time. Nature, 613(7942), 138-144.
Reuben, E., Li, S. X., Suetens, S., Svorenčík, A., Turocy, T., & Kotsidis, V. (2022). Trends in the publication of experimental economics articles. Journal of the Economic Science Association, 8(1), 1-15.
Smith, E. h & Master, Z. (2017) Best Practice to Order Authors in Multi/Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Research Publications, Accountability in Research, 24:4, 243-267