Editorial board members (EBMs) of academic journals play a critical role in the verification of the quality of published papers and dissemination of knowledge. This results in increased interest in the work and scholarly output of EBMs themselves, including publications in parent journal. This paper tries to specify various publication relationships between EBMs and their parent journals and evaluates them focusing on publication ethics principles. The authors propose an additional bibliometric index referred to as the coefficient of publication relationships between EBMs and parent journals that describes publication ties between EBMs and parent journals, the opportunity for their effective use for the development of their journal, as well as possible cases of violation of publication ethics criteria. The results of validation of the new coefficient using a sample of Russian Earth Science serials are given.