Ethical Research is an independent work, written from scratch. This file records what it owes intellectually, because a toolkit about academic integrity should hold itself to the citation standard it asks of its users.
Ethical Research was informed by the broader idea of an academic research copilot built as a Claude Code skill — a category of tool that assists a researcher across the research-to-publication arc while keeping a human in control. One notable example in that category is Academic Research Skills (ARS) by Cheng-I Wu, distributed under CC BY-NC 4.0 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20696614).
We reused ideas and concepts from that line of work — the value of treating fabricated citations as a hard failure, of verifying references against bibliographic indexes, of Socratic research planning, of venue-specific AI-use disclosure, and of keeping mandatory human checkpoints. Ideas, methods, and workflows are not owned by anyone, and we are glad to build on good ones.
We did not reuse its expression. No text, code, prompt wording, file structure, mode names, or taxonomy phrasing was copied or translated from it. Every word and every design choice in this repository was authored independently. That is why Ethical Research carries its own license (MIT) rather than CC BY-NC 4.0: it is a separate work, not a derivative.
Ethical Research is not "the same thing in Korean." It makes deliberately stricter choices:
- It is student-first, not researcher-first. Its default is to refuse submission-ready prose and to coach the human into writing it themselves.
- It ships no full-paper-generation mode at all.
- It makes AI-use disclosure non-optional — you cannot receive a deliverable without also receiving the disclosure statement that goes with it.
- It treats Korean as a first language to compose in, never as a translation target.
- It runs a critical-thinking loop that keeps the human doing the reasoning — asking the user questions rather than just producing answers for them.
- It is grounded in Korean research-ethics frameworks (the national guideline plus SNU and KAIST regulations), not a generic notion of "ethics."
See ETHICS.md for the full charter.
If you are the author of a related project and feel this acknowledgment is inaccurate or incomplete, please open an issue — we will correct it. Getting attribution right is the entire point.