Good ‘research ethics’ means

Research ethics is the body of norms that governs how inquiry may responsibly be carried out. Its standing requirements bear on interests, confidentiality, publication and authorship alike:

• Transparency of interest: any financial or personal interest that could bias the work is declared to the institution, the funder and the journal.

• Confidentiality: material received in trust, above all a manuscript under peer review, is neither circulated nor used before publication.

• Exclusive submission: a manuscript is offered to a single journal, and one body of findings enters the literature once.

• Originality and independent authorship: work submitted for a research degree is the candidate’s own contribution, attributable to that researcher.

Applying the originality requirement to the practices listed: allotting a particular research problem to a single Ph.D. or research student keeps the problem, the data gathered on it, and the thesis that results attributable to one identifiable researcher. It also prevents two candidates from being examined on the same problem, which is precisely what a research degree is meant to certify. So the practice that answers to good research ethics here is assigning a particular research problem to one Ph.D./research student only.

Contrasting the remaining practices by what each one does:

• Not disclosing shares/stocks held in a company that sponsors the research withholds a financial interest in the sponsor, which is exactly the conflict of interest that disclosure norms exist to surface.

• Discussing confidential data from a paper being reviewed for a journal circulates material a reviewer received in trust, breaching peer-review confidentiality before publication.

• Submitting the same research manuscript for publication in more than one journal seeks publication of one body of work in several journals — redundant publication, which multiplies reviewer effort and puts the same findings twice into the literature.

Each of those three is a recognised form of research misconduct, so the ethical practice among the four is the allotment of a distinct research problem to a single research student.