How Students Can Use Business Ethics Highlights

Students in courses on business ethics, corporate social responsibility, corporate citizenship, and sustainability will find BEH a rich source of essay topics. BEH covers an enormous range of topics and sub-topics, so you’re sure to find something that interests you, and writing on something that interests you is one of the keys to successful essay writing. And because the editors of BEH post several fresh stories per week, students can rely on BEH as a source of recent, interesting topics to write on. It’s also worth noting that BEH provides not just news stories, but brief commentary: each time we post a news item, we start by offering a few sentences of commentary. This means that you’ve already got a hint at what one of the key ethical issues might be, even if the news story doesn’t have “ethics” in its headline.

Students taking other kinds of courses may also find BEH useful. If you need an essay topic for a course in strategy or accounting or finance or whatever, and if your instructor lets you choose your own topic, you might want to write on an ethics or CSR issue. Just use the search box at the top of the page to look for relevant items. Make sure to check the topic with your instructor before you start writing, though.

If you find a topic you like on BEH and decide to write an essay on it, that’s great! Make sure, of course, to cite your sources properly. If you’re going to discuss a news item or blog entry that we point to, make sure to cite the original source. If you want to quote one of our brief comments (generally the part above the orange headline in the middle of the page), you should give credit and cite the entry appropriately.

Citation methods differ — check which one your instructor wants you to use — but most citation methods require the same basic information. If you wanted to cite, for example, our entry on Uber’s new privacy policy, you might cite it like this:

• n.a., “Uber’s New Privacy Policy,” Business Ethics Highlights, June 5, 2015. https://businessethicshighlights.com/2015/06/05/ubers-new-privacy-policy/ [Accessed August 15, 2015]

Note: The “n.a.” part means “no author”, since BEH entries don’t have authors, but are the collective product of our editorial team. And you should replace “August 15, 2015” with whatever date you visited us.

But notice! Each BEH item includes two ingredients. It includes an introductory commentary written by The Editors, and that should be cited as shown above. However, each BEH item also includes a link and a paragraph quoted from the linked article. If you click on the link and then quote something you find there you should cite that source, rather than citing BEH. In other words, only cite BEH if you’re quoting or using ideas from our introductory paragraph.

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Also for students:

Using ChatGPT Without Plagiarism, Part 1

Using ChatGPT Without Plagiarism, Part 2

Essay Topics: Business Ethics & CSR

Student’s Guide to Writing Critical Essays in Business Ethics (and beyond)

See also: How Instructors Can Use Business Ethics Highlights