Introduction

For many researchers in the social sciences, including those in applied linguistics, the term ethics evokes the bureaucratic process of fulfilling the requirements of an ethics review board (e.g., in the US, an Institutional Review Board, or IRB) as a preliminary step in conducting human subjects research. The expansion of ethics review boards into the social sciences in the early 2000s has led applied linguistics as a field to experience what Haggerty (Reference Haggerty2004) termed ethics creep, a simultaneous expansion and intensification of external regulation of research activities. The aims of these ethical review boards are: (a) to evaluate the types and risk of harm to participants as a result of research activities, (b) ensure that participants can give informed consent to be part of the research activities, and (c) provide oversight on researcher procedures to maintain participant anonymity/confidentiality (Haggerty, Reference Haggerty2004).

However, despite the narrow perception of research ethics as a set of concerns primarily associated with issues that fall under the purview of IRBs and the like, we would argue that there are ethical dimensions throughout most—if not all—of what we do. The entire research cycle—from conceptualization to design and data collection, to analysis, writing, and dissemination—is laden with decisions that can be viewed through the lens of research ethics (Guillemin & Gillam, Reference Guillemin and Gillam2004). In fact, any and every methodological choice can be layered with an ethical dimension. This realization may not be new, but it has perhaps not yet fully permeated our collective understanding in applied linguistics (see Sterling et al., Reference Sterling, Winke, Gass and De Costa2016). One example of a seemingly innocuous or technical decision laden with an ethical dimension might be the choice to remove (or not to remove) one or more outliers, which can have immediate consequences for interpreting whether a statistically significant effect is present, for example. Nevertheless, a rapidly growing body of work on research ethics in the field has sought to bolster our understanding in this area and to improve our practice as empirical researchers and researcher trainers (e.g., De Costa, 2016*; De Costa et al., 2021*; Isbell et al., 2022*).

Our aim in this timeline is to provide readers with a bird's-eye chronology on the evolution of work on research ethics in applied linguistics carried out over the past four decades. In preparing this timeline, we adopted a synthetic approach, gathering and coding an initial set of 236 publications and other items related to ethics in applied linguistics, teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL), second language acquisition, language assessment, and linguistic research methods (both quantitative and qualitative). Our compilation process began with the TIRF (2021) reference list for ethics in language teaching and research, followed by Google Scholar and library database searches, and forward and backward citation searches. This process yielded 154 journal articles (from 43 journals, and including six special issues), 47 book chapters, 25 books, three sets of ethical guidelines, two sets of research guidelines, two sets of testing guidelines, one dissertation, and one research agenda.Footnote ¹ These items were then coded for bibliographic features (e.g., author, year, source of publication), citation counts, type of document (e.g., primary/secondary research article, review article, position piece), and research paradigm (e.g., quantitative, qualitative, mixed). Among these documents, 18 items focused on quantitative research, 86 on qualitative, and eight on mixed-methods (for items reporting research data). A further 46 items discussed ethics in the context of both quantitative and qualitative research without reporting mixed-method data. The earliest publication identified was from 1980, with dates ranging from 1980 to 2022.

In coding the documents gathered for this timeline, we noted that ethics in applied linguistics research is a topic that has been receiving much more attention in the past 20 years. When reporting the number of entries by decade, we have: 1980–89 = 1, 1990–99 = 5, 2000–2009 = 14, 2010–19 = 15, 2020–2022 = 7. This increase coincides with the introduction of ethics review boards (Haggerty, Reference Haggerty2004), but the conversations around ethics extend far beyond how to navigate the IRB. One likely explanation for increased attention to research ethics is the field's growing concern for methodology and its concomitant reflection on the research practices it employs (Gass et al., Reference Gass, Loewen and Plonsky2021). The four key themes that we identified through our coding process illustrate ways in which our collective understanding of research ethics has evolved over the past four decades.

One major development in the domain of research ethics was a shift from framing ethics as (a) primarily a procedural issue to be addressed by complying with IRB requirements (e.g., obtaining informed consent from human participants) to (b) an issue requiring awareness of both IRB procedures and the day-to-day researcher decisions that impact the research process and, ultimately, research outcomes. Examples of day-to-day decisions include researchers’ choice of role(s) relative to their participants (Sarangi & Candlin, Reference Sarangi and Candlin2003) or methods to handle outliers in their data (Nicklin & Plonsky, Reference Nicklin and Plonsky2020; Paltridge, Reference Paltridge and De Costa2016). Kubanyiova (2008)* terms these issues macro-ethical for the procedural and micro-ethical for the day-to-day. Thus, our first overarching theme is MM (macro/micro), with sub-themes MM-P (procedural) and MM-D (day-to-day).

A second theme connected to the types of macro-/micro-ethical issues faced in a particular study is the research tradition or paradigm being adopted. It is fitting and appropriate—if not inevitable—that discussions of research and researcher ethics relate to different epistemological stances and assumptions as well as different types of data. Entries in the timeline labeled RT indicate that the overarching theme is a particular research tradition, with sub-themes RT-QT (quantitative), RT-QL (qualitative), and RT-M (mixed).

Our third theme is an area of emerging interest in the field: questionable research practices (QRPs).Footnote ² This term refers to ethical grey areas that lie between scientific misconduct (e.g., fabrication, falsification, plagiarism; see Fanelli, Reference Fanelli2009) and responsible conduct of research (RCR; Steneck, Reference Steneck2007). QRPs can occur at any stage in the research process. For instance, cherry-picking findings to support the interests of funding bodies and excluding contributing authors from a publication (or including non-contributing authors) all fall under the umbrella of QRPs, and these are but a few examples (see Isbell et al., 2022*). In the timeline, we have coded entries that address these ethical grey areas with QRP.

A fourth theme for this timeline is the scope of the discussion of ethics. More specifically, we indicate for entries below whether an item addresses ethics as a primary variable under investigation (e.g., Sterling & Gass, 2017*), a secondary aspect of a research study (e.g., Lee, Reference Lee2011), an issue on which the author argues for a position supported by existing literature (e.g., Ortega, 2005*), or a subject for training (e.g., BAAL, 1994*). Entries labeled as “ethics primary” present data about ethics itself, such as implementation of informed consent procedures (Yeager-Woodhouse & Sivell, 2006*) or researcher perception of different ethically-charged scenarios (Sterling & Gass, 2017*). In contrast, “ethics secondary” items tend to share researchers’ reflections on how they navigated ethical issues while conducting otherwise-focused research (e.g., De Costa, 2014*). “Ethics position pieces” (e.g., Wen & Gao, 2007*) focus on presenting a broader ethics-related argument rather than reporting results or researcher reflections for an individual study. Finally, “ethics guidelines and training” are items designed to guide ethical research. Some of these documents were research guidelines produced by professional associations (e.g., American Association of Applied Linguistics [AAAL], British Association of Applied Linguistics [BAAL], TESOL Internatioanl Association [TESOL]), targeting an audience of novice and/or experienced researchers. Others were books, chapters, and articles meant as training resources. Many of these hail from research methods textbooks and demonstrate the change in how research ethics has been viewed and taught in applied linguistics graduate programs. This dimension has been coded as an overarching theme S (scope), with sub-themes S-P (ethics primary), S-S (ethics secondary), and S-PP (ethics position piece), and S-G&T (guidelines and training).

By casting a deliberately wide net in our initial study retrieval and coding, we hope to have captured the breadth of work that has been conducted on ethics in applied linguistics. In the process of selecting these entries, however, we acknowledge that valuable work on adjacent issues has been omitted. The (time)line had to be drawn somewhere. A key inclusion criterion for this timeline was that work needed to be directly relevant to research in applied linguistics. Thus, one major adjacent area we determined to be outside the scope of the present paper is the ethics of language teaching (e.g., Blyth, Reference Blyth2011; Hafernik et al., Reference Hafernik, Messerschmitt and Vandrick2002), including language teacher training (Lynch & Shaw, Reference Lynch and Shaw2005) and test preparation (Hamp-Lyons, Reference Hamp-Lyons1998). Work in this area was generally focused on ethical classroom practices rather than research practices. For similar reasons, we also decided not to include work on the ethics of English as a colonial language (e.g., Motha, Reference Motha2014) and racial representation in professional organizations in the field (Bhattacharya et al., Reference Bhattacharya, Jiang and Canagarajah2020), although we certainly acknowledge that the ongoing conversations in this vein provide key contributions to the understanding of ethics in applied linguistics as a whole. In addition, we are not taking an in-depth focus on meta-research (e.g., research syntheses and meta-analyses; see Norris & Ortega, 2000*; Plonsky et al., Reference Plonsky, Sudina and Hu2021), a field that developed in tandem with an expanded understanding of ethics. While meta-research and research ethics are linked on several fronts (including especially their shared concern for methodological quality as a means to more accurately inform theory, research, and practice; Gass et al., Reference Gass, Loewen and Plonsky2021; Plonsky, Reference Plonsky2014), we largely chose to limit the scope to studies that are more explicitly framed as research ethics pieces. Finally, despite the connections between ethics and statistical literacy training (Loewen et al., Reference Loewen, Lavolette, Spino, Papi, Schmidtke, Sterling and Wolff2014) and data sharing (Nicklin & Plonsky, Reference Nicklin and Plonsky2020; Plonsky et al., Reference Plonsky, Egbert and LaFlair2015), both of these were deemed to be outside the scope of this timeline and were not included.

To summarize, the entries in our timeline have been coded for the following themes:

• • MM: macro/microethics

  • ◦ MM-P: macroethics, procedural, IRB

  • ◦ MM-D: microethics, day-to-day, individual researcher decisions

• • RT: research tradition

  • ◦ RT-QT: quantitative

  • ◦ RT-QL: qualitative

  • ◦ RT-M: mixed

• • QRP: questionable research practices, ethically grey areas

• • S: scope of ethical issue being discussed

  • ◦ S-P: ethics primary

  • ◦ S-S: ethics secondary

  • ◦ S-PP: ethics position piece

  • ◦ S-G&T: researcher guidelines and training materials