Ethical issues in counseling: a trend analysis Yag ˘mur C ¸ erkez 1 • Gloria Manyeruke 1 • Omotoyosi Oduwaye 1 • Stella Shimave 1 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017 Abstract The purpose of this study was to examine research about Ethical Issues in Counseling published in selected professional sources and databases between the period of 1986–2017. The data on documents relating ethical issues contained in the Web of Science, EBSCO, Scopus, Taylor & Francis collected were analyzed using content analysis. Ethical issues, Ethical dilemmas and counseling psychology related keywords and phrases were employed together in the analysis of the documents. In total 157 documents were cate- gorized among be relevant to Ethical issues and counseling and they were analyzed. The results reveal that 2010 was the year the most articles on counselling ethics were published. From 2014 to date there has also been a steady increase in articles on ethics in counseling. This is largely because of the increase in articles in counselling psychology as both developing and developed countries employ such research more to solve their social problems, indigenizing psychological research. The study also revealed that America produced more than half of the sampled articles (51.6%). Keywords Ethics Á Counseling Á Psychology Á Review & Yag ˘mur C ¸ erkez yagmur.cerkez@neu.edu.tr Gloria Manyeruke gloriamanyeruke@gmail.com Omotoyosi Oduwaye oduwayeomotoyosi@gmail.com Stella Shimave stellashimave1@gmail.com 1 Faculty of Education, Department of Psychological Counseling and Guidance, Near East University, Nicoisa, Cyprus 123 Qual Quant DOI 10.1007/s11135-017-0604-6