objectives of research ethics

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences

Your environment. your health., what is ethics in research & why is it important, by david b. resnik, j.d., ph.d..

December 23, 2020

The ideas and opinions expressed in this essay are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of the NIH, NIEHS, or US government.

When most people think of ethics (or morals), they think of rules for distinguishing between right and wrong, such as the Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"), a code of professional conduct like the Hippocratic Oath ("First of all, do no harm"), a religious creed like the Ten Commandments ("Thou Shalt not kill..."), or a wise aphorisms like the sayings of Confucius. This is the most common way of defining "ethics": norms for conduct that distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable behavior.

Most people learn ethical norms at home, at school, in church, or in other social settings. Although most people acquire their sense of right and wrong during childhood, moral development occurs throughout life and human beings pass through different stages of growth as they mature. Ethical norms are so ubiquitous that one might be tempted to regard them as simple commonsense. On the other hand, if morality were nothing more than commonsense, then why are there so many ethical disputes and issues in our society?

Alternatives to Animal Testing

Alternative test methods are methods that replace, reduce, or refine animal use in research and testing

Learn more about Environmental science Basics

One plausible explanation of these disagreements is that all people recognize some common ethical norms but interpret, apply, and balance them in different ways in light of their own values and life experiences. For example, two people could agree that murder is wrong but disagree about the morality of abortion because they have different understandings of what it means to be a human being.

Most societies also have legal rules that govern behavior, but ethical norms tend to be broader and more informal than laws. Although most societies use laws to enforce widely accepted moral standards and ethical and legal rules use similar concepts, ethics and law are not the same. An action may be legal but unethical or illegal but ethical. We can also use ethical concepts and principles to criticize, evaluate, propose, or interpret laws. Indeed, in the last century, many social reformers have urged citizens to disobey laws they regarded as immoral or unjust laws. Peaceful civil disobedience is an ethical way of protesting laws or expressing political viewpoints.

Another way of defining 'ethics' focuses on the disciplines that study standards of conduct, such as philosophy, theology, law, psychology, or sociology. For example, a "medical ethicist" is someone who studies ethical standards in medicine. One may also define ethics as a method, procedure, or perspective for deciding how to act and for analyzing complex problems and issues. For instance, in considering a complex issue like global warming , one may take an economic, ecological, political, or ethical perspective on the problem. While an economist might examine the cost and benefits of various policies related to global warming, an environmental ethicist could examine the ethical values and principles at stake.

See ethics in practice at NIEHS

Read latest updates in our monthly  Global Environmental Health Newsletter

Many different disciplines, institutions , and professions have standards for behavior that suit their particular aims and goals. These standards also help members of the discipline to coordinate their actions or activities and to establish the public's trust of the discipline. For instance, ethical standards govern conduct in medicine, law, engineering, and business. Ethical norms also serve the aims or goals of research and apply to people who conduct scientific research or other scholarly or creative activities. There is even a specialized discipline, research ethics, which studies these norms. See Glossary of Commonly Used Terms in Research Ethics and Research Ethics Timeline .

There are several reasons why it is important to adhere to ethical norms in research. First, norms promote the aims of research , such as knowledge, truth, and avoidance of error. For example, prohibitions against fabricating , falsifying, or misrepresenting research data promote the truth and minimize error.

Join an NIEHS Study

See how we put research Ethics to practice.

Visit Joinastudy.niehs.nih.gov to see the various studies NIEHS perform.

Second, since research often involves a great deal of cooperation and coordination among many different people in different disciplines and institutions, ethical standards promote the values that are essential to collaborative work , such as trust, accountability, mutual respect, and fairness. For example, many ethical norms in research, such as guidelines for authorship , copyright and patenting policies , data sharing policies, and confidentiality rules in peer review, are designed to protect intellectual property interests while encouraging collaboration. Most researchers want to receive credit for their contributions and do not want to have their ideas stolen or disclosed prematurely.

Third, many of the ethical norms help to ensure that researchers can be held accountable to the public . For instance, federal policies on research misconduct, conflicts of interest, the human subjects protections, and animal care and use are necessary in order to make sure that researchers who are funded by public money can be held accountable to the public.

Fourth, ethical norms in research also help to build public support for research. People are more likely to fund a research project if they can trust the quality and integrity of research.

Finally, many of the norms of research promote a variety of other important moral and social values , such as social responsibility, human rights, animal welfare, compliance with the law, and public health and safety. Ethical lapses in research can significantly harm human and animal subjects, students, and the public. For example, a researcher who fabricates data in a clinical trial may harm or even kill patients, and a researcher who fails to abide by regulations and guidelines relating to radiation or biological safety may jeopardize his health and safety or the health and safety of staff and students.

Codes and Policies for Research Ethics

Given the importance of ethics for the conduct of research, it should come as no surprise that many different professional associations, government agencies, and universities have adopted specific codes, rules, and policies relating to research ethics. Many government agencies have ethics rules for funded researchers.

• National Institutes of Health (NIH)
• National Science Foundation (NSF)
• Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
• US Department of Agriculture (USDA)
• Singapore Statement on Research Integrity
• American Chemical Society, The Chemist Professional’s Code of Conduct
• Code of Ethics (American Society for Clinical Laboratory Science)
• American Psychological Association, Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct
• Statement on Professional Ethics (American Association of University Professors)
• Nuremberg Code
• World Medical Association's Declaration of Helsinki

Ethical Principles

The following is a rough and general summary of some ethical principles that various codes address*:

Strive for honesty in all scientific communications. Honestly report data, results, methods and procedures, and publication status. Do not fabricate, falsify, or misrepresent data. Do not deceive colleagues, research sponsors, or the public.

Objectivity

Strive to avoid bias in experimental design, data analysis, data interpretation, peer review, personnel decisions, grant writing, expert testimony, and other aspects of research where objectivity is expected or required. Avoid or minimize bias or self-deception. Disclose personal or financial interests that may affect research.

Keep your promises and agreements; act with sincerity; strive for consistency of thought and action.

Carefulness

Avoid careless errors and negligence; carefully and critically examine your own work and the work of your peers. Keep good records of research activities, such as data collection, research design, and correspondence with agencies or journals.

Share data, results, ideas, tools, resources. Be open to criticism and new ideas.

Transparency

Disclose methods, materials, assumptions, analyses, and other information needed to evaluate your research.

Accountability

Take responsibility for your part in research and be prepared to give an account (i.e. an explanation or justification) of what you did on a research project and why.

Intellectual Property

Honor patents, copyrights, and other forms of intellectual property. Do not use unpublished data, methods, or results without permission. Give proper acknowledgement or credit for all contributions to research. Never plagiarize.

Confidentiality

Protect confidential communications, such as papers or grants submitted for publication, personnel records, trade or military secrets, and patient records.

Responsible Publication

Publish in order to advance research and scholarship, not to advance just your own career. Avoid wasteful and duplicative publication.

Responsible Mentoring

Help to educate, mentor, and advise students. Promote their welfare and allow them to make their own decisions.

Respect for Colleagues

Respect your colleagues and treat them fairly.

Social Responsibility

Strive to promote social good and prevent or mitigate social harms through research, public education, and advocacy.

Non-Discrimination

Avoid discrimination against colleagues or students on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, or other factors not related to scientific competence and integrity.

Maintain and improve your own professional competence and expertise through lifelong education and learning; take steps to promote competence in science as a whole.

Know and obey relevant laws and institutional and governmental policies.

Animal Care

Show proper respect and care for animals when using them in research. Do not conduct unnecessary or poorly designed animal experiments.

Human Subjects protection

When conducting research on human subjects, minimize harms and risks and maximize benefits; respect human dignity, privacy, and autonomy; take special precautions with vulnerable populations; and strive to distribute the benefits and burdens of research fairly.

* Adapted from Shamoo A and Resnik D. 2015. Responsible Conduct of Research, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press).

Ethical Decision Making in Research

Although codes, policies, and principles are very important and useful, like any set of rules, they do not cover every situation, they often conflict, and they require interpretation. It is therefore important for researchers to learn how to interpret, assess, and apply various research rules and how to make decisions and act ethically in various situations. The vast majority of decisions involve the straightforward application of ethical rules. For example, consider the following case:

The research protocol for a study of a drug on hypertension requires the administration of the drug at different doses to 50 laboratory mice, with chemical and behavioral tests to determine toxic effects. Tom has almost finished the experiment for Dr. Q. He has only 5 mice left to test. However, he really wants to finish his work in time to go to Florida on spring break with his friends, who are leaving tonight. He has injected the drug in all 50 mice but has not completed all of the tests. He therefore decides to extrapolate from the 45 completed results to produce the 5 additional results.

Many different research ethics policies would hold that Tom has acted unethically by fabricating data. If this study were sponsored by a federal agency, such as the NIH, his actions would constitute a form of research misconduct , which the government defines as "fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism" (or FFP). Actions that nearly all researchers classify as unethical are viewed as misconduct. It is important to remember, however, that misconduct occurs only when researchers intend to deceive : honest errors related to sloppiness, poor record keeping, miscalculations, bias, self-deception, and even negligence do not constitute misconduct. Also, reasonable disagreements about research methods, procedures, and interpretations do not constitute research misconduct. Consider the following case:

Dr. T has just discovered a mathematical error in his paper that has been accepted for publication in a journal. The error does not affect the overall results of his research, but it is potentially misleading. The journal has just gone to press, so it is too late to catch the error before it appears in print. In order to avoid embarrassment, Dr. T decides to ignore the error.

Dr. T's error is not misconduct nor is his decision to take no action to correct the error. Most researchers, as well as many different policies and codes would say that Dr. T should tell the journal (and any coauthors) about the error and consider publishing a correction or errata. Failing to publish a correction would be unethical because it would violate norms relating to honesty and objectivity in research.

There are many other activities that the government does not define as "misconduct" but which are still regarded by most researchers as unethical. These are sometimes referred to as " other deviations " from acceptable research practices and include:

• Publishing the same paper in two different journals without telling the editors
• Submitting the same paper to different journals without telling the editors
• Not informing a collaborator of your intent to file a patent in order to make sure that you are the sole inventor
• Including a colleague as an author on a paper in return for a favor even though the colleague did not make a serious contribution to the paper
• Discussing with your colleagues confidential data from a paper that you are reviewing for a journal
• Using data, ideas, or methods you learn about while reviewing a grant or a papers without permission
• Trimming outliers from a data set without discussing your reasons in paper
• Using an inappropriate statistical technique in order to enhance the significance of your research
• Bypassing the peer review process and announcing your results through a press conference without giving peers adequate information to review your work
• Conducting a review of the literature that fails to acknowledge the contributions of other people in the field or relevant prior work
• Stretching the truth on a grant application in order to convince reviewers that your project will make a significant contribution to the field
• Stretching the truth on a job application or curriculum vita
• Giving the same research project to two graduate students in order to see who can do it the fastest
• Overworking, neglecting, or exploiting graduate or post-doctoral students
• Failing to keep good research records
• Failing to maintain research data for a reasonable period of time
• Making derogatory comments and personal attacks in your review of author's submission
• Promising a student a better grade for sexual favors
• Using a racist epithet in the laboratory
• Making significant deviations from the research protocol approved by your institution's Animal Care and Use Committee or Institutional Review Board for Human Subjects Research without telling the committee or the board
• Not reporting an adverse event in a human research experiment
• Wasting animals in research
• Exposing students and staff to biological risks in violation of your institution's biosafety rules
• Sabotaging someone's work
• Stealing supplies, books, or data
• Rigging an experiment so you know how it will turn out
• Making unauthorized copies of data, papers, or computer programs
• Owning over $10,000 in stock in a company that sponsors your research and not disclosing this financial interest
• Deliberately overestimating the clinical significance of a new drug in order to obtain economic benefits

These actions would be regarded as unethical by most scientists and some might even be illegal in some cases. Most of these would also violate different professional ethics codes or institutional policies. However, they do not fall into the narrow category of actions that the government classifies as research misconduct. Indeed, there has been considerable debate about the definition of "research misconduct" and many researchers and policy makers are not satisfied with the government's narrow definition that focuses on FFP. However, given the huge list of potential offenses that might fall into the category "other serious deviations," and the practical problems with defining and policing these other deviations, it is understandable why government officials have chosen to limit their focus.

Finally, situations frequently arise in research in which different people disagree about the proper course of action and there is no broad consensus about what should be done. In these situations, there may be good arguments on both sides of the issue and different ethical principles may conflict. These situations create difficult decisions for research known as ethical or moral dilemmas . Consider the following case:

Dr. Wexford is the principal investigator of a large, epidemiological study on the health of 10,000 agricultural workers. She has an impressive dataset that includes information on demographics, environmental exposures, diet, genetics, and various disease outcomes such as cancer, Parkinson’s disease (PD), and ALS. She has just published a paper on the relationship between pesticide exposure and PD in a prestigious journal. She is planning to publish many other papers from her dataset. She receives a request from another research team that wants access to her complete dataset. They are interested in examining the relationship between pesticide exposures and skin cancer. Dr. Wexford was planning to conduct a study on this topic.

Dr. Wexford faces a difficult choice. On the one hand, the ethical norm of openness obliges her to share data with the other research team. Her funding agency may also have rules that obligate her to share data. On the other hand, if she shares data with the other team, they may publish results that she was planning to publish, thus depriving her (and her team) of recognition and priority. It seems that there are good arguments on both sides of this issue and Dr. Wexford needs to take some time to think about what she should do. One possible option is to share data, provided that the investigators sign a data use agreement. The agreement could define allowable uses of the data, publication plans, authorship, etc. Another option would be to offer to collaborate with the researchers.

The following are some step that researchers, such as Dr. Wexford, can take to deal with ethical dilemmas in research:

What is the problem or issue?

It is always important to get a clear statement of the problem. In this case, the issue is whether to share information with the other research team.

What is the relevant information?

Many bad decisions are made as a result of poor information. To know what to do, Dr. Wexford needs to have more information concerning such matters as university or funding agency or journal policies that may apply to this situation, the team's intellectual property interests, the possibility of negotiating some kind of agreement with the other team, whether the other team also has some information it is willing to share, the impact of the potential publications, etc.

What are the different options?

People may fail to see different options due to a limited imagination, bias, ignorance, or fear. In this case, there may be other choices besides 'share' or 'don't share,' such as 'negotiate an agreement' or 'offer to collaborate with the researchers.'

How do ethical codes or policies as well as legal rules apply to these different options?

The university or funding agency may have policies on data management that apply to this case. Broader ethical rules, such as openness and respect for credit and intellectual property, may also apply to this case. Laws relating to intellectual property may be relevant.

Are there any people who can offer ethical advice?

It may be useful to seek advice from a colleague, a senior researcher, your department chair, an ethics or compliance officer, or anyone else you can trust. In the case, Dr. Wexford might want to talk to her supervisor and research team before making a decision.

After considering these questions, a person facing an ethical dilemma may decide to ask more questions, gather more information, explore different options, or consider other ethical rules. However, at some point he or she will have to make a decision and then take action. Ideally, a person who makes a decision in an ethical dilemma should be able to justify his or her decision to himself or herself, as well as colleagues, administrators, and other people who might be affected by the decision. He or she should be able to articulate reasons for his or her conduct and should consider the following questions in order to explain how he or she arrived at his or her decision:

• Which choice will probably have the best overall consequences for science and society?
• Which choice could stand up to further publicity and scrutiny?
• Which choice could you not live with?
• Think of the wisest person you know. What would he or she do in this situation?
• Which choice would be the most just, fair, or responsible?

After considering all of these questions, one still might find it difficult to decide what to do. If this is the case, then it may be appropriate to consider others ways of making the decision, such as going with a gut feeling or intuition, seeking guidance through prayer or meditation, or even flipping a coin. Endorsing these methods in this context need not imply that ethical decisions are irrational, however. The main point is that human reasoning plays a pivotal role in ethical decision-making but there are limits to its ability to solve all ethical dilemmas in a finite amount of time.

Promoting Ethical Conduct in Science

Do U.S. research institutions meet or exceed federal mandates for instruction in responsible conduct of research? A national survey

 Read about U.S. research instutuins follow federal manadates for ethics in research 

Learn more about NIEHS Research

Most academic institutions in the US require undergraduate, graduate, or postgraduate students to have some education in the responsible conduct of research (RCR) . The NIH and NSF have both mandated training in research ethics for students and trainees. Many academic institutions outside of the US have also developed educational curricula in research ethics

Those of you who are taking or have taken courses in research ethics may be wondering why you are required to have education in research ethics. You may believe that you are highly ethical and know the difference between right and wrong. You would never fabricate or falsify data or plagiarize. Indeed, you also may believe that most of your colleagues are highly ethical and that there is no ethics problem in research..

If you feel this way, relax. No one is accusing you of acting unethically. Indeed, the evidence produced so far shows that misconduct is a very rare occurrence in research, although there is considerable variation among various estimates. The rate of misconduct has been estimated to be as low as 0.01% of researchers per year (based on confirmed cases of misconduct in federally funded research) to as high as 1% of researchers per year (based on self-reports of misconduct on anonymous surveys). See Shamoo and Resnik (2015), cited above.

Clearly, it would be useful to have more data on this topic, but so far there is no evidence that science has become ethically corrupt, despite some highly publicized scandals. Even if misconduct is only a rare occurrence, it can still have a tremendous impact on science and society because it can compromise the integrity of research, erode the public’s trust in science, and waste time and resources. Will education in research ethics help reduce the rate of misconduct in science? It is too early to tell. The answer to this question depends, in part, on how one understands the causes of misconduct. There are two main theories about why researchers commit misconduct. According to the "bad apple" theory, most scientists are highly ethical. Only researchers who are morally corrupt, economically desperate, or psychologically disturbed commit misconduct. Moreover, only a fool would commit misconduct because science's peer review system and self-correcting mechanisms will eventually catch those who try to cheat the system. In any case, a course in research ethics will have little impact on "bad apples," one might argue.

According to the "stressful" or "imperfect" environment theory, misconduct occurs because various institutional pressures, incentives, and constraints encourage people to commit misconduct, such as pressures to publish or obtain grants or contracts, career ambitions, the pursuit of profit or fame, poor supervision of students and trainees, and poor oversight of researchers (see Shamoo and Resnik 2015). Moreover, defenders of the stressful environment theory point out that science's peer review system is far from perfect and that it is relatively easy to cheat the system. Erroneous or fraudulent research often enters the public record without being detected for years. Misconduct probably results from environmental and individual causes, i.e. when people who are morally weak, ignorant, or insensitive are placed in stressful or imperfect environments. In any case, a course in research ethics can be useful in helping to prevent deviations from norms even if it does not prevent misconduct. Education in research ethics is can help people get a better understanding of ethical standards, policies, and issues and improve ethical judgment and decision making. Many of the deviations that occur in research may occur because researchers simply do not know or have never thought seriously about some of the ethical norms of research. For example, some unethical authorship practices probably reflect traditions and practices that have not been questioned seriously until recently. If the director of a lab is named as an author on every paper that comes from his lab, even if he does not make a significant contribution, what could be wrong with that? That's just the way it's done, one might argue. Another example where there may be some ignorance or mistaken traditions is conflicts of interest in research. A researcher may think that a "normal" or "traditional" financial relationship, such as accepting stock or a consulting fee from a drug company that sponsors her research, raises no serious ethical issues. Or perhaps a university administrator sees no ethical problem in taking a large gift with strings attached from a pharmaceutical company. Maybe a physician thinks that it is perfectly appropriate to receive a $300 finder’s fee for referring patients into a clinical trial.

If "deviations" from ethical conduct occur in research as a result of ignorance or a failure to reflect critically on problematic traditions, then a course in research ethics may help reduce the rate of serious deviations by improving the researcher's understanding of ethics and by sensitizing him or her to the issues.

Finally, education in research ethics should be able to help researchers grapple with the ethical dilemmas they are likely to encounter by introducing them to important concepts, tools, principles, and methods that can be useful in resolving these dilemmas. Scientists must deal with a number of different controversial topics, such as human embryonic stem cell research, cloning, genetic engineering, and research involving animal or human subjects, which require ethical reflection and deliberation.

Public Health Notes

Your partner for better health, research ethics: definition, principles and advantages.

October 13, 2020 Kusum Wagle Epidemiology 0

Table of Contents

What is Research Ethics?

• Ethics are the set of rules that govern our expectations of our own and others’ behavior.
• Research ethics are the set of ethical guidelines that guides us on how scientific research should be conducted and disseminated.
• Research ethics govern the standards of conduct for scientific researchers It is the guideline for responsibly conducting the research.
• Research that implicates human subjects or contributors rears distinctive and multifaceted ethical, legitimate, communal and administrative concerns.
• Research ethics is unambiguously concerned in the examination of ethical issues that are upraised when individuals are involved as participants in the study.
• Research ethics committee/Institutional Review Board (IRB) reviews whether the research is ethical enough or not to protect the rights, dignity and welfare of the respondents.

Objectives of Research Ethics:

• The first and comprehensive objective – to guard/protect human participants, their dignity, rights and welfare .
• The second objective – to make sure that research is directed in a manner that assists welfares of persons, groups and/or civilization as a whole.
• The third objective – to inspect particular research events and schemes for their ethical reliability, considering issues such as the controlling risk, protection of privacy and the progression of informed consent.

Principles of Research Ethics:

The general principles of research ethics are:

Broad Categorization of Principles of Research Ethics:

Broadly categorizing, there are mainly five principles of research ethics:

1. MINIMIZING THE RISK OF HARM

It is necessary to minimize any sort of harm to the participants. There are a number of forms of harm that participants can be exposed to. They are:

• Bodily harm to contributors.
• Psychological agony and embarrassment.
• Social drawback.
• Violation of participant’s confidentiality and privacy.

In order to minimize the risk of harm, the researcher/data collector should:

• Obtain  informed consent from participants.
• Protecting anonymity and confidentiality of participants.
• Avoiding  misleading practices when planning research.
• Providing participants with the  right to withdraw .

2. OBTAINING INFORMED CONSENT 

One of the fundamentals of research ethics is the notion of  informed consent .

Informed consent means that a person knowingly, voluntarily and intelligently gives consent to participate in a research.

Informed consent means that the participants should be well-informed about the:

• Introduction and objective of the research
• Purpose of the discussion
• Anticipated advantages, benefits/harm from the research (if any)
• Use of research
• Their role in research
• Methods which will be used to protect anonymity and confidentiality of the participant
• Freedom to not answer any question/withdraw from the research
• Who to contact if the participant need additional information about the research

3. PROTECTING ANONYMITY AND CONFIDENTIALITY

Protecting the  anonymity  and  confidentiality  of research participants is an additionally applied constituent of research ethics.

Protecting anonymity: It means keeping the participant anonymous. It involves not revealing the name, caste or any other information about the participants that may reveal his/her identity.

Maintaining confidentiality: It refers to ensuring that the information given by the participant are confidential and not shared with anyone, except the research team. It is also about keeping the information secretly from other people.

4. AVOIDING MISLEADING PRACTICES

• The researcher should avoid all the deceptive and misleading practices that might misinform the respondent.
• It includes avoiding all the activities like communicating wrong messages, giving false assurance, giving false information etc.

5. PROVIDING THE RIGHT TO WITHDRAW

• Participants have to have the right to withdraw at any point of the research.
• When any respondent decides on to withdraw from the research, they should not be  stressed or  forced  in any manner to try to discontinue them from withdrawing.

Apart from the above-mentioned ethics, other ethical aspects things that must be considered while doing research are:

Protection of vulnerable groups of people:

• Vulnerability is one distinctive feature of people incapable to protect their moralities and wellbeing. Vulnerable groups comprise captive populations (detainees, established, students, etc.), mentally ill persons, and aged people, children, critically ill or dying, poor, with learning incapacities, sedated or insensible.
• Their participation in research can be endorsed to their incapability to give an informed consent and to the need for their further safety and sensitivity from the research/researcher as they are in a greater risk of being betrayed, exposed or forced to participate.

  Skills of the researcher:

• Researchers should have the basic skills and familiarity for the specific study to be carried out and be conscious of the bounds of personal competence in research.
• Any lack of knowledge in the area under research must be clearly specified.
• Inexperienced researchers should work under qualified supervision that has to be revised by an ethics commission.

Advantages of Research Ethics:

• Research ethics promote the aims of research.
• It increases trust among the researcher and the respondent.
• It is important to adhere to ethical principles in order to protect the dignity, rights and welfare of research participants.
• Researchers can be held accountable and answerable for their actions.
• Ethics promote social and moral values.
• Promote s the  ambitions of research, such as understanding, veracity, and dodging of error.
• Ethical standards uphold the  values that are vital to cooperative work , such as belief, answerability, mutual respect, and impartiality.
• Ethical norms in research also aid to construct  public upkeep for research. People are more likely to trust a research project if they can trust the worth and reliability of research.

Limitations of Research Ethics:

For subjects:

• Possibilities to physical integrity, containing those linked with experimental drugs and dealings and with other involvements that will be used in the study (e.g. measures used to observe research participants, such as blood sampling, X-rays or lumbar punctures).
• Psychological risks: for example, a questionnaire may perhaps signify a risk if it fears traumatic events or happenings that are especially traumatic.
• Social, legal and economic risks : for example, if personal information collected during a study is unintentionally released, participants might face a threat of judgment and stigmatization.
• Certain tribal or inhabitant groups may possibly suffer from discrimination or stigmatization, burdens because of research, typically if associates of those groups are recognized as having a greater-than-usual risk of devouring a specific disease.
• The research may perhaps have an influence on the prevailing health system: for example, human and financial capitals dedicated to research may distract attention from other demanding health care necessities in the community.

How can we ensure ethics at different steps of research?

The following process helps to ensure ethics at different steps of research:

• Collect the facts and talk over intellectual belongings openly
• Outline the ethical matters
• Detect the affected parties (stakeholders)
• Ascertain the forfeits
• Recognize the responsibilities (principles, rights, justice)
• Contemplate your personality and truthfulness
• Deliberate innovatively about possible actions
• Respect privacy and confidentiality
• Resolve on the appropriate ethical action and be willing to deal with divergent point of view.

References and For More Information:

http://dissertation.laerd.com/principles-of-research-ethics.php

https://researchethics.ca/what-is-research-ethics/

https://www.who.int/ethics/Ethics_basic_concepts_ENG.pdf

https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/resources/bioethics/whatis/index.cfm

https://research.ku.edu/sites/research.ku.edu/files/docs/EESE_EthicalDecisionmakingFramework.pdf

https://www.who.int/ethics/research/en/

https://www.ufrgs.br/bioetica/cioms2008.pdf

https://www.who.int/ethics/research/en/#:~:text=WHO%20Research%20Ethics%20Review%20Committee,financially%20or%20technically%20by%20WHO .

https://www.who.int/reproductivehealth/topics/ethics/review_bodies_guide_serg/en/

https://www.who.int/ethics/indigenous_peoples/en/index13.html

https://www.who.int/bulletin/archives/80(2)114.pdf

https://www.who.int/about/ethics

https://www.slideshare.net/uqudent/introduction-to-research-ethics

https://libguides.library.cityu.edu.hk/researchmethods/ethics#:~:text=Methods%20by%20Subject-,What%20is%20Research%20Ethics%3F,ensure%20a%20high%20ethical%20standard .

https://www.apa.org/monitor/jan03/principles

https://www.hsj.gr/medicine/what-are-the-major-ethical-issues-in-conducting-research-is-there-a-conflict-between-the-research-ethics-and-the-nature-of-nursing.php?aid=3485

https://www.skillsyouneed.com/learn/research-ethics.html

• advantages of research ethics
• difference between confidentiality and anonymity in research
• minimizing the risk of harm in research
• obtaining informed consent in research
• principles of research ethics
• PROTECTING ANONYMITY AND CONFIDENTIALITY
• what are the advantages of research ethics
• what are the limitations of research ethics
• what are the principles of research ethics
• what is obtaining informed consent in research
• what is research ethics
• what is right to withdraw in research
• what is ROTECTING ANONYMITY AND CONFIDENTIALITY in research

Copyright © 2024 | WordPress Theme by MH Themes

Have a language expert improve your writing

Run a free plagiarism check in 10 minutes, generate accurate citations for free.

• Knowledge Base

Methodology

• Ethical Considerations in Research | Types & Examples

Ethical Considerations in Research | Types & Examples

Published on October 18, 2021 by Pritha Bhandari . Revised on May 9, 2024.

Ethical considerations in research are a set of principles that guide your research designs and practices. Scientists and researchers must always adhere to a certain code of conduct when collecting data from people.

The goals of human research often include understanding real-life phenomena, studying effective treatments, investigating behaviors, and improving lives in other ways. What you decide to research and how you conduct that research involve key ethical considerations.

These considerations work to

• protect the rights of research participants
• enhance research validity
• maintain scientific or academic integrity

Table of contents

Why do research ethics matter, getting ethical approval for your study, types of ethical issues, voluntary participation, informed consent, confidentiality, potential for harm, results communication, examples of ethical failures, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about research ethics.

Research ethics matter for scientific integrity, human rights and dignity, and collaboration between science and society. These principles make sure that participation in studies is voluntary, informed, and safe for research subjects.

You’ll balance pursuing important research objectives with using ethical research methods and procedures. It’s always necessary to prevent permanent or excessive harm to participants, whether inadvertent or not.

Defying research ethics will also lower the credibility of your research because it’s hard for others to trust your data if your methods are morally questionable.

Even if a research idea is valuable to society, it doesn’t justify violating the human rights or dignity of your study participants.

Receive feedback on language, structure, and formatting

Professional editors proofread and edit your paper by focusing on:

• Academic style
• Vague sentences
• Style consistency

See an example

Before you start any study involving data collection with people, you’ll submit your research proposal to an institutional review board (IRB) .

An IRB is a committee that checks whether your research aims and research design are ethically acceptable and follow your institution’s code of conduct. They check that your research materials and procedures are up to code.

If successful, you’ll receive IRB approval, and you can begin collecting data according to the approved procedures. If you want to make any changes to your procedures or materials, you’ll need to submit a modification application to the IRB for approval.

If unsuccessful, you may be asked to re-submit with modifications or your research proposal may receive a rejection. To get IRB approval, it’s important to explicitly note how you’ll tackle each of the ethical issues that may arise in your study.

There are several ethical issues you should always pay attention to in your research design, and these issues can overlap with each other.

You’ll usually outline ways you’ll deal with each issue in your research proposal if you plan to collect data from participants.

Voluntary participation means that all research subjects are free to choose to participate without any pressure or coercion.

All participants are able to withdraw from, or leave, the study at any point without feeling an obligation to continue. Your participants don’t need to provide a reason for leaving the study.

It’s important to make it clear to participants that there are no negative consequences or repercussions to their refusal to participate. After all, they’re taking the time to help you in the research process , so you should respect their decisions without trying to change their minds.

Voluntary participation is an ethical principle protected by international law and many scientific codes of conduct.

Take special care to ensure there’s no pressure on participants when you’re working with vulnerable groups of people who may find it hard to stop the study even when they want to.

Informed consent refers to a situation in which all potential participants receive and understand all the information they need to decide whether they want to participate. This includes information about the study’s benefits, risks, funding, and institutional approval.

You make sure to provide all potential participants with all the relevant information about

• what the study is about
• the risks and benefits of taking part
• how long the study will take
• your supervisor’s contact information and the institution’s approval number

Usually, you’ll provide participants with a text for them to read and ask them if they have any questions. If they agree to participate, they can sign or initial the consent form. Note that this may not be sufficient for informed consent when you work with particularly vulnerable groups of people.

If you’re collecting data from people with low literacy, make sure to verbally explain the consent form to them before they agree to participate.

For participants with very limited English proficiency, you should always translate the study materials or work with an interpreter so they have all the information in their first language.

In research with children, you’ll often need informed permission for their participation from their parents or guardians. Although children cannot give informed consent, it’s best to also ask for their assent (agreement) to participate, depending on their age and maturity level.

Anonymity means that you don’t know who the participants are and you can’t link any individual participant to their data.

You can only guarantee anonymity by not collecting any personally identifying information—for example, names, phone numbers, email addresses, IP addresses, physical characteristics, photos, and videos.

In many cases, it may be impossible to truly anonymize data collection . For example, data collected in person or by phone cannot be considered fully anonymous because some personal identifiers (demographic information or phone numbers) are impossible to hide.

You’ll also need to collect some identifying information if you give your participants the option to withdraw their data at a later stage.

Data pseudonymization is an alternative method where you replace identifying information about participants with pseudonymous, or fake, identifiers. The data can still be linked to participants but it’s harder to do so because you separate personal information from the study data.

Confidentiality means that you know who the participants are, but you remove all identifying information from your report.

All participants have a right to privacy, so you should protect their personal data for as long as you store or use it. Even when you can’t collect data anonymously, you should secure confidentiality whenever you can.

Some research designs aren’t conducive to confidentiality, but it’s important to make all attempts and inform participants of the risks involved.

As a researcher, you have to consider all possible sources of harm to participants. Harm can come in many different forms.

• Psychological harm: Sensitive questions or tasks may trigger negative emotions such as shame or anxiety.
• Social harm: Participation can involve social risks, public embarrassment, or stigma.
• Physical harm: Pain or injury can result from the study procedures.
• Legal harm: Reporting sensitive data could lead to legal risks or a breach of privacy.

It’s best to consider every possible source of harm in your study as well as concrete ways to mitigate them. Involve your supervisor to discuss steps for harm reduction.

Make sure to disclose all possible risks of harm to participants before the study to get informed consent. If there is a risk of harm, prepare to provide participants with resources or counseling or medical services if needed.

Some of these questions may bring up negative emotions, so you inform participants about the sensitive nature of the survey and assure them that their responses will be confidential.

The way you communicate your research results can sometimes involve ethical issues. Good science communication is honest, reliable, and credible. It’s best to make your results as transparent as possible.

Take steps to actively avoid plagiarism and research misconduct wherever possible.

Plagiarism means submitting others’ works as your own. Although it can be unintentional, copying someone else’s work without proper credit amounts to stealing. It’s an ethical problem in research communication because you may benefit by harming other researchers.

Self-plagiarism is when you republish or re-submit parts of your own papers or reports without properly citing your original work.

This is problematic because you may benefit from presenting your ideas as new and original even though they’ve already been published elsewhere in the past. You may also be infringing on your previous publisher’s copyright, violating an ethical code, or wasting time and resources by doing so.

In extreme cases of self-plagiarism, entire datasets or papers are sometimes duplicated. These are major ethical violations because they can skew research findings if taken as original data.

You notice that two published studies have similar characteristics even though they are from different years. Their sample sizes, locations, treatments, and results are highly similar, and the studies share one author in common.

Research misconduct

Research misconduct means making up or falsifying data, manipulating data analyses, or misrepresenting results in research reports. It’s a form of academic fraud.

These actions are committed intentionally and can have serious consequences; research misconduct is not a simple mistake or a point of disagreement about data analyses.

Research misconduct is a serious ethical issue because it can undermine academic integrity and institutional credibility. It leads to a waste of funding and resources that could have been used for alternative research.

Later investigations revealed that they fabricated and manipulated their data to show a nonexistent link between vaccines and autism. Wakefield also neglected to disclose important conflicts of interest, and his medical license was taken away.

This fraudulent work sparked vaccine hesitancy among parents and caregivers. The rate of MMR vaccinations in children fell sharply, and measles outbreaks became more common due to a lack of herd immunity.

Research scandals with ethical failures are littered throughout history, but some took place not that long ago.

Some scientists in positions of power have historically mistreated or even abused research participants to investigate research problems at any cost. These participants were prisoners, under their care, or otherwise trusted them to treat them with dignity.

To demonstrate the importance of research ethics, we’ll briefly review two research studies that violated human rights in modern history.

These experiments were inhumane and resulted in trauma, permanent disabilities, or death in many cases.

After some Nazi doctors were put on trial for their crimes, the Nuremberg Code of research ethics for human experimentation was developed in 1947 to establish a new standard for human experimentation in medical research.

In reality, the actual goal was to study the effects of the disease when left untreated, and the researchers never informed participants about their diagnoses or the research aims.

Although participants experienced severe health problems, including blindness and other complications, the researchers only pretended to provide medical care.

When treatment became possible in 1943, 11 years after the study began, none of the participants were offered it, despite their health conditions and high risk of death.

Ethical failures like these resulted in severe harm to participants, wasted resources, and lower trust in science and scientists. This is why all research institutions have strict ethical guidelines for performing research.

If you want to know more about statistics , methodology , or research bias , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Normal distribution
• Measures of central tendency
• Chi square tests
• Confidence interval
• Quartiles & Quantiles
• Cluster sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Thematic analysis
• Cohort study
• Peer review
• Ethnography

Research bias

• Implicit bias
• Cognitive bias
• Conformity bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Availability heuristic
• Attrition bias
• Social desirability bias

Ethical considerations in research are a set of principles that guide your research designs and practices. These principles include voluntary participation, informed consent, anonymity, confidentiality, potential for harm, and results communication.

Scientists and researchers must always adhere to a certain code of conduct when collecting data from others .

These considerations protect the rights of research participants, enhance research validity , and maintain scientific integrity.

Research ethics matter for scientific integrity, human rights and dignity, and collaboration between science and society. These principles make sure that participation in studies is voluntary, informed, and safe.

Anonymity means you don’t know who the participants are, while confidentiality means you know who they are but remove identifying information from your research report. Both are important ethical considerations .

You can only guarantee anonymity by not collecting any personally identifying information—for example, names, phone numbers, email addresses, IP addresses, physical characteristics, photos, or videos.

You can keep data confidential by using aggregate information in your research report, so that you only refer to groups of participants rather than individuals.

These actions are committed intentionally and can have serious consequences; research misconduct is not a simple mistake or a point of disagreement but a serious ethical failure.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

Bhandari, P. (2024, May 09). Ethical Considerations in Research | Types & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved September 10, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/methodology/research-ethics/

Is this article helpful?

Pritha Bhandari

Other students also liked, data collection | definition, methods & examples, what is self-plagiarism | definition & how to avoid it, how to avoid plagiarism | tips on citing sources, get unlimited documents corrected.

✔ Free APA citation check included ✔ Unlimited document corrections ✔ Specialized in correcting academic texts

Site Search

• How to Search
• Advisory Group
• Editorial Board
• OEC Fellows
• History and Funding
• Using OEC Materials
• Collections
• Research Ethics Resources
• Ethics Projects
• Communities of Practice
• Get Involved
• Submit Content
• Open Access Membership
• Become a Partner
• Advanced Search
• Webinar Series

Introduction: What is Research Ethics?

Research Ethics is defined here to be the ethics of the planning, conduct, and reporting of research. This introduction covers what research ethics is, its ethical distinctions, approaches to teaching research ethics, and other resources on this topic.

What is Research Ethics

Why Teach Research Ethics

Animal Subjects

Biosecurity

Collaboration

Conflicts of Interest

Data Management

Human Subjects

Peer Review

Publication

Research Misconduct

Social Responsibility

Stem Cell Research

Whistleblowing

Descriptions of educational settings , including in the classroom, and in research contexts.

Case Studies

Other Discussion Tools

Information about the history and authors of the Resources for Research Ethics Collection

What is Research Ethics?

Research Ethics is defined here to be the ethics of the planning, conduct, and reporting of research. It is clear that research ethics should include:

• Protections of human and animal subjects

However, not all researchers use human or animal subjects, nor are the ethical dimensions of research confined solely to protections for research subjects. Other ethical challenges are rooted in many dimensions of research, including the:

• Collection, use, and interpretation of research data
• Methods for reporting and reviewing research plans or findings
• Relationships among researchers with one another
• Relationships between researchers and those that will be affected by their research
• Means for responding to misunderstandings, disputes, or misconduct
• Options for promoting ethical conduct in research

The domain of research ethics is intended to include nothing less than the fostering of research that protects the interests of the public, the subjects of research, and the researchers themselves.

Ethical Distinctions

In discussing or teaching research ethics, it is important to keep some basic distinctions in mind.

• It is important not to confuse moral claims about how people ought to behave with descriptive claims about how they in fact do behave. From the fact that gift authorship or signing off on un-reviewed data may be "common practice" in some contexts, it doesn't follow that they are morally or professionally justified. Nor is morality to be confused with the moral beliefs or ethical codes that a given group or society holds (how some group thinks people should live). A belief in segregation is not morally justified simply because it is widely held by a group of people or given society. Philosophers term this distinction between prescriptive and descriptive claims the 'is-ought distinction.'  
• A second important distinction is that between morality and the law. The law may or may not conform to the demands of ethics (Kagan, 1998). To take a contemporary example: many believe that the law prohibiting federally funded stem cell research is objectionable on moral (as well as scientific) grounds, i.e., that such research can save lives and prevent much human misery. History is full of examples of bad laws, that is laws now regarded as morally unjustifiable, e.g., the laws of apartheid, laws prohibiting women from voting or inter-racial couples from marrying.  
• It is also helpful to distinguish between two different levels of discussion (or two different kinds of ethical questions): first-order or "ground-level" questions and second-order questions.  
• First-order moral questions concern what we should do. Such questions may be very general or quite specific. One might ask whether the tradition of 'senior' authorship should be defended and preserved or, more generally, what are the principles that should go into deciding the issue of 'senior' authorship. Such questions and the substantive proposals regarding how to answer them belong to the domain of what moral philosophers call 'normative ethics.'  
• Second-order moral questions concern the nature and purpose of morality itself. When someone claims that falsifying data is wrong, what exactly is the standing of this claim? What exactly does the word 'wrong' mean in the conduct of scientific research? And what are we doing when we make claims about right and wrong, scientific integrity and research misconduct? These second-order questions are quite different from the ground-level questions about how to conduct one's private or professional life raised above. They concern the nature of morality rather than its content, i.e., what acts are required, permitted or prohibited. This is the domain of what moral philosophers call 'metaethics' (Kagan, 1998).

Ethical Approaches

Each of these approaches provides moral principles and ways of thinking about the responsibilities, duties and obligations of moral life. Individually and jointly, they can provide practical guidance in ethical decision-making.

• One of the most influential and familiar approaches to ethics is deontological ethics, associated with Immanuel Kant (1742-1804). Deontological ethics hold certain acts as right or wrong in themselves, e.g., promise breaking or lying. So, for example, in the context of research, fraud, plagiarism and misrepresentation are regarded as morally wrong in themselves, not simply because they (tend to) have bad consequences. The deontological approach is generally grounded in a single fundamental principle: Act as you would wish others to act towards you OR always treat persons as an end, never as a means to an end.  
• From such central principles are derived rules or guidelines for what is permitted, required and prohibited. Objections to principle-based or deontological ethics include the difficulty of applying highly general principles to specific cases, e.g.: Does treating persons as ends rule out physician-assisted suicide, or require it? Deontological ethics is generally contrasted to consequentialist ethics (Honderich, 1995).  
• According to consequentialist approaches, the rightness or wrongness of an action depends solely on its consequences. One should act in such a way as to bring about the best state of affairs, where the best state of affairs may be understood in various ways, e.g., as the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain or maximizing the satisfaction of preferences. A theory such as Utilitarianism (with its roots in the work of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) is generally taken as the paradigm example of consequentialism. Objections to consequentialist ethics tend to focus on its willingness to regard individual rights and values as "negotiable." So, for example, most people would regard murder as wrong independently of the fact that killing one person might allow several others to be saved (the infamous sacrifice of an ailing patient to provide organs for several other needy patients). Similarly, widespread moral opinion holds certain values important (integrity, justice) not only because they generally lead to good outcomes, but in and of themselves.
• Virtue ethics focuses on moral character rather than action and behavior considered in isolation. Central to this approach is the question what ought we (as individuals, as scientists, as physicians) to be rather than simply what we ought to do. The emphasis here is on inner states, that is, moral dispositions and habits such as courage or a developed sense of personal integrity. Virtue ethics can be a useful approach in the context of RCR and professional ethics, emphasizing the importance of moral virtues such as compassion, honesty, and respect. This approach has also a great deal to offer in discussions of bioethical issues where a traditional emphasis on rights and abstract principles frequently results in polarized, stalled discussions (e.g., abortion debates contrasting the rights of the mother against the rights of the fetus).  
• The term 'an ethics of care' grows out of the work of Carol Gilligan, whose empirical work in moral psychology claimed to discover a "different voice," a mode of moral thinking distinct from principle-based moral thinking (e.g., the theories of Kant and Mill). An ethics of care stresses compassion and empathetic understanding, virtues Gilligan associated with traditional care-giving roles, especially those of women.  
• This approach differs from traditional moral theories in two important ways. First, it assumes that it is the connections between persons, e.g., lab teams, colleagues, parents and children, student and mentor, not merely the rights and obligations of discrete individuals that matter. The moral world, on this view, is best seen not as the interaction of discrete individuals, each with his or her own interests and rights, but as an interrelated web of obligations and commitment. We interact, much of the time, not as private individuals, but as members of families, couples, institutions, research groups, a given profession and so on. Second, these human relationships, including relationships of dependency, play a crucial role on this account in determining what our moral obligations and responsibilities are. So, for example, individuals have special responsibilities to care for their children, students, patients, and research subjects.  
• An ethics of care is thus particularly useful in discussing human and animal subjects research, issues of informed consent, and the treatment of vulnerable populations such as children, the infirm or the ill.  
• The case study approach begins from real or hypothetical cases. Its objective is to identify the intuitively plausible principles that should be taken into account in resolving the issues at hand. The case study approach then proceeds to critically evaluate those principles. In discussing whistle-blowing, for example, a good starting point is with recent cases of research misconduct, seeking to identify and evaluate principles such as a commitment to the integrity of science, protecting privacy, or avoiding false or unsubstantiated charges. In the context of RCR instruction, case studies provide one of the most interesting and effective approaches to developing sensitivity to ethical issues and to honing ethical decision-making skills.  
• Strictly speaking, casuistry is more properly understood as a method for doing ethics rather than as itself an ethical theory. However, casuistry is not wholly unconnected to ethical theory. The need for a basis upon which to evaluate competing principles, e.g., the importance of the well-being of an individual patient vs. a concern for just allocation of scarce medical resources, makes ethical theory relevant even with case study approaches.  
• Applied ethics is a branch of normative ethics. It deals with practical questions particularly in relation to the professions. Perhaps the best known area of applied ethics is bioethics, which deals with ethical questions arising in medicine and the biological sciences, e.g., questions concerning the application of new areas of technology (stem cells, cloning, genetic screening, nanotechnology, etc.), end of life issues, organ transplants, and just distribution of healthcare. Training in responsible conduct of research or "research ethics" is merely one among various forms of professional ethics that have come to prominence since the 1960s. Worth noting, however, is that concern with professional ethics is not new, as ancient codes such as the Hippocratic Oath and guild standards attest (Singer, 1986).
• Adams D, Pimple KD (2005): Research Misconduct and Crime: Lessons from Criminal Science on Preventing Misconduct and Promoting Integrity. Accountability in Research 12(3):225-240.
• Anderson MS, Horn AS, Risbey KR, Ronning EA, De Vries R, Martinson BC (2007): What Do Mentoring and Training in the Responsible Conduct of Research Have To Do with Scientists' Misbehavior? Findings from a National Survey of NIH-Funded Scientists . Academic Medicine 82(9):853-860.
• Bulger RE, Heitman E (2007): Expanding Responsible Conduct of Research Instruction across the University. Academic Medicine. 82(9):876-878.
• Kalichman MW (2006): Ethics and Science: A 0.1% solution. Issues in Science and Technology 23:34-36.
• Kalichman MW (2007): Responding to Challenges in Educating for the Responsible Conduct of Research, Academic Medicine. 82(9):870-875.
• Kalichman MW, Plemmons DK (2007): Reported Goals for Responsible Conduct of Research Courses. Academic Medicine. 82(9):846-852.
• Kalichman MW (2009): Evidence-based research ethics. The American Journal of Bioethics 9(6&7): 85-87.
• Pimple KD (2002): Six Domains of Research Ethics: A Heuristic Framework for the Responsible Conduct of Research. Science and Engineering Ethics 8(2):191-205.
• Steneck NH (2006): Fostering Integrity in Research: Definitions, Current Knowledge, and Future Directions. Science and Engineering Ethics 12:53-74.
• Steneck NH, Bulger RE (2007): The History, Purpose, and Future of Instruction in the Responsible Conduct of Research. Academic Medicine. 82(9):829-834.
• Vasgird DR (2007): Prevention over Cure: The Administrative Rationale for Education in the Responsible Conduct of Research. Academic Medicine. 82(9):835-837.
• Aristotle. The Nichomachean Ethics.
• Beauchamp RL, Childress JF (2001): Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 5th edition, NY: Oxford University Press.
• Bentham, J (1781): An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.
• Gilligan C (1993): In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Glover, Jonathan (1977): Penguin Books.
• Honderich T, ed. (1995): The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
• Kagan S (1998): Normative Ethics. Westview Press.
• Kant I (1785): Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.
• Kant I (1788): Critique of Practical Reason.
• Kant I (1797): The Metaphysics of Morals.
• Kant I (1797): On a Supposed right to Lie from Benevolent Motives.
• Kuhse H, Singer P (1999): Bioethics: An Anthology. Blackwell Publishers.
• Mill JS (1861): Utilitarianism.
• Rachels J (1999): The Elements of Moral Philosophy, 3rd edition, Boston: McGraw-Hill.
• Regan T (1993): Matters of Life and Death: New Introductory Essays in Moral Philosophy, 3rd edition. New York: McGraw-Hill. The history of ethics.
• Singer P (1993): Practical Ethics, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press.

The Resources for Research Ethics Education site was originally developed and maintained by Dr. Michael Kalichman, Director of the Research Ethics Program at the University of California San Diego. The site was transferred to the Online Ethics Center in 2021 with the permission of the author.

Related Resources

Submit Content to the OEC   Donate

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. 2055332. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

This page has been archived and is no longer being updated regularly.

Cover Story

Five principles for research ethics

Cover your bases with these ethical strategies

By DEBORAH SMITH

Monitor Staff

January 2003, Vol 34, No. 1

Print version: page 56

13 min read

• Conducting Research

Not that long ago, academicians were often cautious about airing the ethical dilemmas they faced in their research and academic work, but that environment is changing today. Psychologists in academe are more likely to seek out the advice of their colleagues on issues ranging from supervising graduate students to how to handle sensitive research data , says George Mason University psychologist June Tangney, PhD.

"There has been a real change in the last 10 years in people talking more frequently and more openly about ethical dilemmas of all sorts," she explains.

Indeed, researchers face an array of ethical requirements: They must meet professional, institutional and federal standards for conducting research with human participants, often supervise students they also teach and have to sort out authorship issues, just to name a few.

Here are five recommendations APA's Science Directorate gives to help researchers steer clear of ethical quandaries:

1. Discuss intellectual property frankly

Academe's competitive "publish-or-perish" mindset can be a recipe for trouble when it comes to who gets credit for authorship . The best way to avoid disagreements about who should get credit and in what order is to talk about these issues at the beginning of a working relationship, even though many people often feel uncomfortable about such topics.

"It's almost like talking about money," explains Tangney. "People don't want to appear to be greedy or presumptuous."

APA's Ethics Code offers some guidance: It specifies that "faculty advisors discuss publication credit with students as early as feasible and throughout the research and publication process as appropriate." When researchers and students put such understandings in writing, they have a helpful tool to continually discuss and evaluate contributions as the research progresses.

However, even the best plans can result in disputes, which often occur because people look at the same situation differently. "While authorship should reflect the contribution," says APA Ethics Office Director Stephen Behnke, JD, PhD, "we know from social science research that people often overvalue their contributions to a project. We frequently see that in authorship-type situations. In many instances, both parties genuinely believe they're right." APA's Ethics Code stipulates that psychologists take credit only for work they have actually performed or to which they have substantially contributed and that publication credit should accurately reflect the relative contributions: "Mere possession of an institutional position, such as department chair, does not justify authorship credit," says the code. "Minor contributions to the research or to the writing for publications are acknowledged appropriately, such as in footnotes or in an introductory statement."

The same rules apply to students. If they contribute substantively to the conceptualization, design, execution, analysis or interpretation of the research reported, they should be listed as authors. Contributions that are primarily technical don't warrant authorship. In the same vein, advisers should not expect ex-officio authorship on their students' work.

Matthew McGue, PhD, of the University of Minnesota, says his psychology department has instituted a procedure to avoid murky authorship issues. "We actually have a formal process here where students make proposals for anything they do on the project," he explains. The process allows students and faculty to more easily talk about research responsibility, distribution and authorship.

Psychologists should also be cognizant of situations where they have access to confidential ideas or research, such as reviewing journal manuscripts or research grants, or hearing new ideas during a presentation or informal conversation. While it's unlikely reviewers can purge all of the information in an interesting manuscript from their thinking, it's still unethical to take those ideas without giving credit to the originator.

"If you are a grant reviewer or a journal manuscript reviewer [who] sees someone's research [that] hasn't been published yet, you owe that person a duty of confidentiality and anonymity," says Gerald P. Koocher, PhD, editor of the journal Ethics and Behavior and co-author of "Ethics in Psychology: Professional Standards and Cases" (Oxford University Press, 1998).

Researchers also need to meet their ethical obligations once their research is published: If authors learn of errors that change the interpretation of research findings, they are ethically obligated to promptly correct the errors in a correction, retraction, erratum or by other means.

To be able to answer questions about study authenticity and allow others to reanalyze the results, authors should archive primary data and accompanying records for at least five years, advises University of Minnesota psychologist and researcher Matthew McGue, PhD. "Store all your data. Don't destroy it," he says. "Because if someone charges that you did something wrong, you can go back."

"It seems simple, but this can be a tricky area," says Susan Knapp, APA's deputy publisher. "The APA Publication Manual Section 8.05 has some general advice on what to retain and suggestions about things to consider in sharing data."

The APA Ethics Code requires psychologists to release their data to others who want to verify their conclusions, provided that participants' confidentiality can be protected and as long as legal rights concerning proprietary data don't preclude their release. However, the code also notes that psychologists who request data in these circumstances can only use the shared data for reanalysis; for any other use, they must obtain a prior written agreement.

2. Be conscious of multiple roles

APA's Ethics Code says psychologists should avoid relationships that could reasonably impair their professional performance or could exploit or harm others. But it also notes that many kinds of multiple relationships aren't unethical--as long as they're not reasonably expected to have adverse effects.

That notwithstanding, psychologists should think carefully before entering into multiple relationships with any person or group, such as recruiting students or clients as participants in research studies or investigating the effectiveness of a product of a company whose stock they own.

For example, when recruiting students from your Psychology 101 course to participate in an experiment, be sure to make clear that participation is voluntary. If participation is a course requirement, be sure to note that in the class syllabus, and ensure that participation has educative value by, for instance, providing a thorough debriefing to enhance students' understanding of the study. The 2002 Ethics Code also mandates in Standard 8.04b that students be given equitable alternatives to participating in research.

Perhaps one of the most common multiple roles for researchers is being both a mentor and lab supervisor to students they also teach in class. Psychologists need to be especially cautious that they don't abuse the power differential between themselves and students, say experts. They shouldn't, for example, use their clout as professors to coerce students into taking on additional research duties.

By outlining the nature and structure of the supervisory relationship before supervision or mentoring begins, both parties can avoid misunderstandings, says George Mason University's Tangney. It's helpful to create a written agreement that includes both parties' responsibilities as well as authorship considerations, intensity of the supervision and other key aspects of the job.

"While that's the ideal situation, in practice we do a lot less of that than we ought to," she notes. "Part of it is not having foresight up front of how a project or research study is going to unfold."

That's why experts also recommend that supervisors set up timely and specific methods to give students feedback and keep a record of the supervision, including meeting times, issues discussed and duties assigned.

If psychologists do find that they are in potentially harmful multiple relationships, they are ethically mandated to take steps to resolve them in the best interest of the person or group while complying with the Ethics Code.

3. Follow informed-consent rules

When done properly, the consent process ensures that individuals are voluntarily participating in the research with full knowledge of relevant risks and benefits.

"The federal standard is that the person must have all of the information that might reasonably influence their willingness to participate in a form that they can understand and comprehend," says Koocher, dean of Simmons College's School for Health Studies.

APA's Ethics Code mandates that psychologists who conduct research should inform participants about:

The purpose of the research, expected duration and procedures.

Participants' rights to decline to participate and to withdraw from the research once it has started, as well as the anticipated consequences of doing so.

Reasonably foreseeable factors that may influence their willingness to participate, such as potential risks, discomfort or adverse effects.

Any prospective research benefits.

Limits of confidentiality, such as data coding, disposal, sharing and archiving, and when confidentiality must be broken.

Incentives for participation.

Who participants can contact with questions.

Experts also suggest covering the likelihood, magnitude and duration of harm or benefit of participation, emphasizing that their involvement is voluntary and discussing treatment alternatives, if relevant to the research.

Keep in mind that the Ethics Code includes specific mandates for researchers who conduct experimental treatment research. Specifically, they must inform individuals about the experimental nature of the treatment, services that will or will not be available to the control groups, how participants will be assigned to treatments and control groups, available treatment alternatives and compensation or monetary costs of participation.

If research participants or clients are not competent to evaluate the risks and benefits of participation themselves--for example, minors or people with cognitive disabilities--then the person who's giving permission must have access to that same information, says Koocher.

Remember that a signed consent form doesn't mean the informing process can be glossed over, say ethics experts. In fact, the APA Ethics Code says psychologists can skip informed consent in two instances only: When permitted by law or federal or institutional regulations, or when the research would not reasonably be expected to distress or harm participants and involves one of the following:

The study of normal educational practices, curricula or classroom management methods conducted in educational settings.

Anonymous questionnaires, naturalistic observations or archival research for which disclosure of responses would not place participants at risk of criminal or civil liability or damage their financial standing, employability or reputation, and for which confidentiality is protected.

The study of factors related to job or organization effectiveness conducted in organizational settings for which there is no risk to participants' employability, and confidentiality is protected.

If psychologists are precluded from obtaining full consent at the beginning--for example, if the protocol includes deception, recording spontaneous behavior or the use of a confederate--they should be sure to offer a full debriefing after data collection and provide people with an opportunity to reiterate their consent, advise experts.

The code also says psychologists should make reasonable efforts to avoid offering "excessive or inappropriate financial or other inducements for research participation when such inducements are likely to coerce participation."

4. Respect confidentiality and privacy

Upholding individuals' rights to confidentiality and privacy is a central tenet of every psychologist's work. However, many privacy issues are idiosyncratic to the research population, writes Susan Folkman, PhD, in " Ethics in Research with Human Participants " (APA, 2000). For instance, researchers need to devise ways to ask whether participants are willing to talk about sensitive topics without putting them in awkward situations, say experts. That could mean they provide a set of increasingly detailed interview questions so that participants can stop if they feel uncomfortable.

And because research participants have the freedom to choose how much information about themselves they will reveal and under what circumstances, psychologists should be careful when recruiting participants for a study, says Sangeeta Panicker, PhD, director of the APA Science Directorate's Research Ethics Office. For example, it's inappropriate to obtain contact information of members of a support group to solicit their participation in research. However, you could give your colleague who facilitates the group a letter to distribute that explains your research study and provides a way for individuals to contact you, if they're interested.

Other steps researchers should take include:

Discuss the limits of confidentiality. Give participants information about how their data will be used, what will be done with case materials, photos and audio and video recordings, and secure their consent.

Know federal and state law. Know the ins and outs of state and federal law that might apply to your research. For instance, the Goals 2000: Education Act of 1994 prohibits asking children about religion, sex or family life without parental permission.

Another example is that, while most states only require licensed psychologists to comply with mandatory reporting laws, some laws also require researchers to report abuse and neglect. That's why it's important for researchers to plan for situations in which they may learn of such reportable offenses. Generally, research psychologists can consult with a clinician or their institution's legal department to decide the best course of action.

Take practical security measures. Be sure confidential records are stored in a secure area with limited access, and consider stripping them of identifying information, if feasible. Also, be aware of situations where confidentiality could inadvertently be breached, such as having confidential conversations in a room that's not soundproof or putting participants' names on bills paid by accounting departments.

Think about data sharing before research begins. If researchers plan to share their data with others, they should note that in the consent process, specifying how they will be shared and whether data will be anonymous. For example, researchers could have difficulty sharing sensitive data they've collected in a study of adults with serious mental illnesses because they failed to ask participants for permission to share the data. Or developmental data collected on videotape may be a valuable resource for sharing, but unless a researcher asked permission back then to share videotapes, it would be unethical to do so. When sharing, psychologists should use established techniques when possible to protect confidentiality, such as coding data to hide identities. "But be aware that it may be almost impossible to entirely cloak identity, especially if your data include video or audio recordings or can be linked to larger databases," says Merry Bullock, PhD, associate executive director in APA's Science Directorate.

Understand the limits of the Internet. Since Web technology is constantly evolving, psychologists need to be technologically savvy to conduct research online and cautious when exchanging confidential information electronically. If you're not a Internet whiz, get the help of someone who is. Otherwise, it may be possible for others to tap into data that you thought was properly protected.

5. Tap into ethics resources

One of the best ways researchers can avoid and resolve ethical dilemmas is to know both what their ethical obligations are and what resources are available to them.

"Researchers can help themselves make ethical issues salient by reminding themselves of the basic underpinnings of research and professional ethics," says Bullock. Those basics include:

The Belmont Report. Released by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research in 1979, the report provided the ethical framework for ensuing human participant research regulations and still serves as the basis for human participant protection legislation (see Further Reading).

APA's Ethics Code , which offers general principles and specific guidance for research activities.

Moreover, despite the sometimes tense relationship researchers can have with their institutional review boards (IRBs), these groups can often help researchers think about how to address potential dilemmas before projects begin, says Panicker. But psychologists must first give their IRBs the information they need to properly understand a research proposal.

"Be sure to provide the IRB with detailed and comprehensive information about the study, such as the consent process, how participants will be recruited and how confidential information will be protected," says Bullock. "The more information you give your IRB, the better educated its members will become about behavioral research, and the easier it will be for them to facilitate your research."

As cliché as it may be, says Panicker, thinking positively about your interactions with an IRB can help smooth the process for both researchers and the IRBs reviewing their work.

Further reading

American Psychological Association. (2002). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct. American Psychologist, 57 (12).

Sales, B.D., & Folkman, S. (Eds.). (2000). Ethics in research with human participants . Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

APA's Research Ethics Office in the Science Directorate; e-mail ; Web site: APA Science .

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) offers educational materials on human subjects .

NIH Bioethics Resources Web site .

The Department of Health and Human Services' (DHHS) Office of Research Integrity Web site .

DHHS Office of Human Research Protections Web site .

The 1979 Belmont Report on protecting human subjects .

Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs Web site: www.aahrpp.org .

Related Articles

• Ethics in research with animals

Letters to the Editor

• Send us a letter

Understanding Research Ethics

• First Online: 22 April 2022

Cite this chapter

• Sarah Cuschieri 2  

665 Accesses

1 Citations

As a researcher, whatever your career stage, you need to understand and practice good research ethics. Moral and ethical principles are requisite in research to ensure no deception or harm to participants, scientific community, and society occurs. Failure to follow such principles leads to research misconduct, in which case the researcher faces repercussions ranging from withdrawal of an article from publication to potential job loss. This chapter describes the various types of research misconduct that you should be aware of, i.e., data fabrication and falsification, plagiarism, research bias, data integrity, researcher and funder conflicts of interest. A sound comprehension of research ethics will take you a long way in your career.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save.

• Get 10 units per month
• Download Article/Chapter or eBook
• 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
• Cancel anytime
• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Durable hardcover edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Anatomy, Faculty of Medicine and Surgery, University of Malta, Msida, Malta

Sarah Cuschieri

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Cuschieri, S. (2022). Understanding Research Ethics. In: A Roadmap to Successful Scientific Publishing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99295-8_2

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99295-8_2

Published : 22 April 2022

Publisher Name : Springer, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-030-99294-1

Online ISBN : 978-3-030-99295-8

eBook Packages : Biomedical and Life Sciences Biomedical and Life Sciences (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

Research Ethics & Ethical Considerations

A Plain-Language Explainer With Examples

By: Derek Jansen (MBA) | Reviewers: Dr Eunice Rautenbach | May 2024

Research ethics are one of those “ unsexy but essential ” subjects that you need to fully understand (and apply) to conquer your dissertation, thesis or research paper. In this post, we’ll unpack research ethics using plain language and loads of examples .

Overview: Research Ethics 101

• What are research ethics?
• Why should you care?
• Research ethics principles
• Respect for persons
• Beneficence
• Objectivity
• Key takeaways

What (exactly) are research ethics?

At the simplest level, research ethics are a set of principles that ensure that your study is conducted responsibly, safely, and with integrity. More specifically, research ethics help protect the rights and welfare of your research participants, while also ensuring the credibility of your research findings.

Research ethics are critically important for a number of reasons:

Firstly, they’re a complete non-negotiable when it comes to getting your research proposal approved. Pretty much all universities will have a set of ethical criteria that student projects need to adhere to – and these are typically very strictly enforced. So, if your proposed study doesn’t tick the necessary ethical boxes, it won’t be approved .

Beyond the practical aspect of approval, research ethics are essential as they ensure that your study’s participants (whether human or animal) are properly protected . In turn, this fosters trust between you and your participants – as well as trust between researchers and the public more generally. As you can probably imagine, it wouldn’t be good if the general public had a negative perception of researchers!

Last but not least, research ethics help ensure that your study’s results are valid and reliable . In other words, that you measured the thing you intended to measure – and that other researchers can repeat your study. If you’re not familiar with the concepts of reliability and validity , we’ve got a straightforward explainer video covering that below.

The Core Principles

In practical terms, each university or institution will have its own ethics policy – so, what exactly constitutes “ethical research” will vary somewhat between institutions and countries. Nevertheless, there are a handful of core principles that shape ethics policies. These principles include:

Let’s unpack each of these to make them a little more tangible.

Ethics Principle 1: Respect for persons

As the name suggests, this principle is all about ensuring that your participants are treated fairly and respectfully . In practical terms, this means informed consent – in other words, participants should be fully informed about the nature of the research, as well as any potential risks. Additionally, they should be able to withdraw from the study at any time. This is especially important when you’re dealing with vulnerable populations – for example, children, the elderly or people with cognitive disabilities.

Another dimension of the “respect for persons” principle is confidentiality and data protection . In other words, your participants’ personal information should be kept strictly confidential and secure at all times. Depending on the specifics of your project, this might also involve anonymising or masking people’s identities. As mentioned earlier, the exact requirements will vary between universities, so be sure to thoroughly review your institution’s ethics policy before you start designing your project.

Need a helping hand?

Ethics Principle 2: Beneficence

This principle is a little more opaque, but in simple terms beneficence means that you, as the researcher, should aim to maximise the benefits of your work, while minimising any potential harm to your participants.

In practical terms, benefits could include advancing knowledge, improving health outcomes, or providing educational value. Conversely, potential harms could include:

• Physical harm from accidents or injuries
• Psychological harm, such as stress or embarrassment
• Social harm, such as stigmatisation or loss of reputation
• Economic harm – in other words, financial costs or lost income

Simply put, the beneficence principle means that researchers must always try to identify potential risks and take suitable measures to reduce or eliminate them.

Ethics Principle 3: Objectivity

As you can probably guess, this principle is all about attempting to minimise research bias to the greatest degree possible. In other words, you’ll need to reduce subjectivity and increase objectivity wherever possible.

In practical terms, this principle has the largest impact on the methodology of your study – specifically the data collection and data analysis aspects. For example, you’ll need to ensure that the selection of your participants (in other words, your sampling strategy ) is aligned with your research aims – and that your sample isn’t skewed in a way that supports your presuppositions.

If you’re keen to learn more about research bias and the various ways in which you could unintentionally skew your results, check out the video below.

Ethics Principle 4: Integrity

Again, no surprises here; this principle is all about producing “honest work” . It goes without saying that researchers should always conduct their work honestly and transparently, report their findings accurately, and disclose any potential conflicts of interest upfront.

This is all pretty obvious, but another aspect of the integrity principle that’s sometimes overlooked is respect for intellectual property . In practical terms, this means you need to honour any patents, copyrights, or other forms of intellectual property that you utilise while undertaking your research. Along the same vein, you shouldn’t use any unpublished data, methods, or results without explicit, written permission from the respective owner.

Linked to all of this is the broader issue of plagiarism . Needless to say, if you’re drawing on someone else’s published work, be sure to cite your sources, in the correct format. To make life easier, use a reference manager such as Mendeley or Zotero to ensure that your citations and reference list are perfectly polished.

FAQs: Research Ethics

Research ethics & ethical considertation, what is informed consent.

Informed consent simply means providing your potential participants with all necessary information about the study. This should include information regarding the study’s purpose, procedures, risks, and benefits. This information allows your potential participants to make a voluntary and informed decision about whether to participate.

How should I obtain consent from non-English speaking participants?

What about animals.

When conducting research with animals, ensure you adhere to ethical guidelines for the humane treatment of animals. Again, the exact requirements here will vary between institutions, but typically include minimising pain and distress, using alternatives where possible, and obtaining approval from an animal care and use committee.

What is the role of the ERB or IRB?

An ethics review board (ERB) or institutional review board (IRB) evaluates research proposals to ensure they meet ethical standards. The board reviews study designs, consent forms, and data handling procedures, to protect participants’ welfare and rights.

How can I obtain ethical approval for my project?

This varies between universities, but you will typically need to submit a detailed research proposal to your institution’s ethics committee. This proposal should include your research objectives, methods, and how you plan to address ethical considerations like informed consent, confidentiality, and risk minimisation. You can learn more about how to write a proposal here .

How do I ensure ethical collaboration when working with colleagues?

Collaborative research should be conducted with mutual respect and clear agreements on roles, contributions, and publication credits. Open communication is key to preventing conflicts and misunderstandings. Also, be sure to check whether your university has any specific requirements with regards to collaborative efforts and division of labour. 

How should I address ethical concerns relating to my funding source?

Key takeaways: research ethics 101.

Here’s a quick recap of the key points we’ve covered:

• Research ethics are a set of principles that ensure that your study is conducted responsibly.
• It’s essential that you design your study around these principles, or it simply won’t get approved.
• The four ethics principles we looked at are: respect for persons, beneficence, objectivity and integrity

As mentioned, the exact requirements will vary slightly depending on the institution and country, so be sure to thoroughly review your university’s research ethics policy before you start developing your study.

Psst... there’s more!

This post was based on one of our popular Research Bootcamps . If you're working on a research project, you'll definitely want to check this out ...

Great piece!!!

Submit a Comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

• Print Friendly

What is Research Ethics?

Originally published 1999-2013 at Resources for Research Ethics Education, a web project directed by Michael Kalichman, Ph.D., and Dena Plemmons, Ph.D., from the University of California-San Diego Research Ethics Program and the San Diego Research Ethics Consortium. Republished with permission.

See Also:   Teaching Research Ethics: Why Teach?

Research Ethics is defined here to be the ethics of the planning, conduct, and reporting of research.

It is clear that research ethics should include:

• Protections of human and animal subjects

However, not all researchers use human or animal subjects, nor are the ethical dimensions of research confined solely to protections for research subjects. Other ethical challenges are rooted in many dimensions of research, including the:

• Collection, use, and interpretation of research data
• Methods for reporting and reviewing research plans or findings
• Relationships among researchers with one another
• Relationships between researchers and those that will be affected by their research
• Means for responding to misunderstandings, disputes, or misconduct
• Options for promoting ethical conduct in research

For the purpose of this online resource, the domain of research ethics is intended to include nothing less than the fostering of research that protects the interests of the public, the subjects of research, and the researchers themselves.

Important Ethical Distinctions

In discussing or teaching research ethics, it is important to keep some basic distinctions in mind.

Prescriptive vs. descriptive claims

It is important not to confuse moral claims about how people ought to behave with descriptive claims about how they in fact do behave. From the fact that gift authorship or signing off on unreviewed data may be “common practice” in some contexts, it doesn’t follow that they are morally or professionally justified. Nor is morality to be confused with the moral beliefs or ethical codes that a given group or society holds (how some group thinks people should live). A belief in segregation is not morally justified simply because it is widely held by a group of people or given society. Philosophers term this distinction between prescriptive and descriptive claims the “is-ought distinction.”

Law vs. morality

A second important distinction is that between morality and the law. The law may or may not conform to the demands of ethics (Kagan, 1998). To take a contemporary example: many believe that the law prohibiting federally funded stem cell research is objectionable on moral (as well as scientific) grounds, i.e., that such research can save lives and prevent much human misery. History is full of examples of bad laws, that is laws now regarded as morally unjustifiable, e.g., the laws of apartheid, laws prohibiting women from voting or inter-racial couples from marrying.

It is also helpful to distinguish between two different levels of discussion (or two different kinds of ethical questions): first-order or “ground-level” questions and second-order questions.

First-order questions

First-order moral questions concern what we should do. Such questions may be very general or quite specific. One might ask whether the tradition of “senior” authorship should be defended and preserved or, more generally, what are the principles that should go into deciding the issue of senior authorship. Such questions and the substantive proposals regarding how to answer them belong to the domain of what moral philosophers call “normative ethics.”

Second-order questions

Second-order moral questions concern the nature and purpose of morality itself. When someone claims that falsifying data is wrong, what exactly is the standing of this claim? What exactly does the word “wrong” mean in the conduct of scientific research? And what are we doing when we make claims about right and wrong, scientific integrity and research misconduct? These second-order questions are quite different from the ground-level questions about how to conduct one’s private or professional life raised above. They concern the nature of morality rather than its content, i.e., what acts are required, permitted or prohibited. This is the domain of what moral philosophers call “metaethics” (Kagan, 1998).

Ways to Approach Ethics

Each of these approaches provides moral principles and ways of thinking about the responsibilities, duties and obligations of moral life. Individually and jointly, they can provide practical guidance in ethical decision-making.

Deontological ethics

One of the most influential and familiar approaches to ethics is deontological ethics, associated with Immanuel Kant (1742-1804). Deontological ethics hold certain acts as right or wrong in themselves, e.g., promise breaking or lying. So, for example, in the context of research, fraud, plagiarism and misrepresentation are regarded as morally wrong in themselves, not simply because they (tend to) have bad consequences. The deontological approach is generally grounded in a single fundamental principle: Act as you would wish others to act towards you OR always treat persons as an end, never as a means to an end.

From such central principles are derived rules or guidelines for what is permitted, required and prohibited. Objections to principle-based or deontological ethics include the difficulty of applying highly general principles to specific cases, e.g.: Does treating persons as ends rule out physician-assisted suicide, or require it? Deontological ethics is generally contrasted to consequentialist ethics (Honderich, 1995).

Consequentialist ethics

According to consequentialist approaches, the rightness or wrongness of an action depends solely on its consequences. One should act in such a way as to bring about the best state of affairs, where the best state of affairs may be understood in various ways, e.g., as the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain or maximizing the satisfaction of preferences. A theory such as Utilitarianism (with its roots in the work of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) is generally taken as the paradigm example of consequentialism. Objections to consequentialist ethics tend to focus on its willingness to regard individual rights and values as “negotiable.” So, for example, most people would regard murder as wrong independently of the fact that killing one person might allow several others to be saved (the infamous sacrifice of an ailing patient to provide organs for several other needy patients). Similarly, widespread moral opinion holds certain values important (integrity, justice) not only because they generally lead to good outcomes, but in and of themselves.

Virtue ethics

Virtue ethics focuses on moral character rather than action and behavior considered in isolation. Central to this approach is the question what ought we (as individuals, as scientists, as physicians) to be rather than simply what we ought to do. The emphasis here is on inner states, that is, moral dispositions and habits such as courage or a developed sense of personal integrity. Virtue ethics can be a useful approach in the context of RCR and professional ethics, emphasizing the importance of moral virtues such as compassion, honesty, and respect. This approach has also a great deal to offer in discussions of bioethical issues where a traditional emphasis on rights and abstract principles frequently results in polarized, stalled discussions (e.g., abortion debates contrasting the rights of the mother against the rights of the fetus).

An ethics of care

The term “ethics of care” grows out of the work of Carol Gilligan, whose empirical work in moral psychology claimed to discover a “different voice,” a mode of moral thinking distinct from principle-based moral thinking (e.g., the theories of Kant and Mill). An ethics of care stresses compassion and empathetic understanding, virtues Gilligan associated with traditional care-giving roles, especially those of women.

This approach differs from traditional moral theories in two important ways. First, it assumes that it is the connections between persons, e.g., lab teams, colleagues, parents and children, student and mentor, not merely the rights and obligations of discrete individuals that matter. The moral world, on this view, is best seen not as the interaction of discrete individuals, each with his or her own interests and rights, but as an interrelated web of obligations and commitment. We interact, much of the time, not as private individuals, but as members of families, couples, institutions, research groups, a given profession and so on. Second, these human relationships, including relationships of dependency, play a crucial role on this account in determining what our moral obligations and responsibilities are. So, for example, individuals have special responsibilities to care for their children, students, patients, and research subjects.

An ethics of care is thus particularly useful in discussing human and animal subjects research, issues of informed consent, and the treatment of vulnerable populations such as children, the infirm or the ill.

Casuistry or case study approaches

The case study approach begins from real or hypothetical cases. Its objective is to identify the intuitively plausible principles that should be taken into account in resolving the issues at hand. The case study approach then proceeds to critically evaluate those principles. In discussing whistle-blowing, for example, a good starting point is with recent cases of research misconduct, seeking to identify and evaluate principles such as a commitment to the integrity of science, protecting privacy, or avoiding false or unsubstantiated charges. In the context of RCR instruction, case studies provide one of the most interesting and effective approaches to developing sensitivity to ethical issues and to honing ethical decision-making skills.

Strictly speaking, casuistry is more properly understood as a method for doing ethics rather than as itself an ethical theory. However, casuistry is not wholly unconnected to ethical theory. The need for a basis upon which to evaluate competing principles, e.g., the importance of the well-being of an individual patient vs. a concern for just allocation of scarce medical resources, makes ethical theory relevant even with case study approaches.

Applied ethics

Applied ethics is a branch of normative ethics. It deals with practical questions particularly in relation to the professions. Perhaps the best known area of applied ethics is bioethics, which deals with ethical questions arising in medicine and the biological sciences, e.g., questions concerning the application of new areas of technology (stem cells, cloning, genetic screening, nanotechnology, etc.), end of life issues, organ transplants, and just distribution of healthcare. Training in responsible conduct of research or “research ethics” is merely one among various forms of professional ethics that have come to prominence since the 1960s. Worth noting, however, is that concern with professional ethics is not new, as ancient codes such as the Hippocratic Oath and guild standards attest (Singer, 1986).

Research Ethics

• Adams, D., Pimple, K.D. (2005). Research Misconduct and Crime: Lessons from Criminal Science on Preventing Misconduct and Promoting Integrity.  Accountability in Research, 12 (3): 225-240.
• Anderson, M.S., Horn, A.S., Risbey, K.R., Ronning, E.A., De Vries, R., Martinson, B.C. (2007). What Do Mentoring and Training in the Responsible Conduct of Research Have To Do with Scientists’ Misbehavior? Findings from a National Survey of NIH-Funded Scientists.  Academic Medicine, 82 (9): 853-860.
• Bulger, R.E. & Heitman, E. (2007). Expanding Responsible Conduct of Research Instruction across the University.  Academic Medicine, 82 (9): 876-878.
• Kalichman, M.W. (2006). Ethics and Science: A 0.1% solution.  Issues in Science and Technology, 23 : 34-36.
• Kalichman, M.W. (2007). Responding to Challenges in Educating for the Responsible Conduct of Research.  Academic Medicine, 82 (9): 870-875.
• Kalichman, M.W., Plemmons, D.K. (2007). Reported Goals for Responsible Conduct of Research Courses.  Academic Medicine, 82 (9): 846-852.
• Kalichman, M.W. (2009). Evidence-based research ethics.  The American Journal of Bioethics, 9 (6&7): 85-87.
• Pimple, K.D. (2002). Six Domains of Research Ethics: A Heuristic Framework for the Responsible Conduct of Research.  Science and Engineering Ethics, 8 (2): 191-205.
• Steneck, N.H. (2006). Fostering Integrity in Research: Definitions, Current Knowledge, and Future Directions.  Science and Engineering Ethics, 12 : 53-74.
• Steneck, N.H., Bulger, R.E. (2007). The History, Purpose, and Future of Instruction in the Responsible Conduct of Research.  Academic Medicine, 82 (9): 829-834.
• Vasgird, D.R. (2007). Prevention over Cure: The Administrative Rationale for Education in the Responsible Conduct of Research.  Academic Medicine, 82 (9): 835-837.
• Aristotle.  The Nichomachean Ethics .
• Beauchamp, R.L. & Childress, J.F. (2001).  Principles of Biomedical Ethics , 5th edition. NY: Oxford University Press.
• Bentham, J. (1781).  An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.
• Gilligan, C. (1993).  In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Glover, Jonathan. (1977).  Causing Death and Saving Lives.  Penguin Books.
• Honderich, T, ed. (1995).  The Oxford Companion to Philosophy.  Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
• Kagan, S. (1998).  Normative Ethics . Westview Press.
• Kant, I. (1785).  Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals .
• Kant, I. (1788).  Critique of Practical Reason .
• Kant, I. (1797).  The Metaphysics of Morals .
• Kant, I. (1797).  On a Supposed right to Lie from Benevolent Motives .
• Kuhse, H. & Singer, P. (1999).  Bioethics: An Anthology . Blackwell Publishers.
• Mill, J.S. (1861).  Utilitarianism.
• Rachels, J. (1999).  The Elements of Moral Philosophy , 3rd edition. Boston: McGraw-Hill.
• Regan, T. (1993).  Matters of Life and Death: New Introductory Essays in Moral Philosophy , 3rd edition. New York: McGraw-Hill. The history of ethics
• Singer, P (1993).  Practical Ethics , 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

6.3 Principles of Research Ethics

There are general ethical principles that guide and underpin the proper conduct of research. The term “ethical principles” refers to those general rules that operate as a foundational rationale for the numerous specific ethical guidelines and assessments of human behaviour. 7 The National Statement on ‘ethical conduct in human research’ states that ethical behaviour entails acting with integrity, motivated by a deep respect and concern for others. 8 Before research can be conducted, it is essential for researchers to develop and submit to a relevant human research ethics committee a research proposal that meets the National Statement’s requirements and is ethically acceptable. There are five key ethical research principles – respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice 8, 9 (Figure 6.1). These principles are universal, which means they apply everywhere in the world, without national, cultural, legal, or economic boundaries. Therefore, everyone involved in human research studies should understand and follow these principles.

Research merit and integrity

Research merit and integrity relate to the quality or value of a study in contributing to the knowledge base of a particular field or discipline. 8,9 This is determined by the originality and significance of the research question, the soundness and appropriateness of the research methodology, the rigor and reliability of the data analysis, the clarity and coherence of the research findings, and the potential impact of the research on advancing knowledge or solving practical problems. Research must be developed with methods that are appropriate to the study’s objectives, based on a thorough analysis of the relevant literature, and conducted using facilities and resources that are appropriate for the study’s needs. In essence, research must adhere to recognised standards of integrity and be designed, reviewed and conducted in a manner that ensures quality and transparency. 8 Examples of unacceptable practices include plagiarism through appropriation or use of the ideas or intellectual property of others; falsification by creating false data or other aspects of research (including documentation and consent of participants); distortion through improper manipulation and/or selection of data, images and/or consent.

Respect for persons

Respect for humans is an acknowledgement of their inherent worth, and it refers to the moral imperative to regard the autonomy of others. 8,10 Respect entails taking into account the well-being, beliefs, perspectives, practises, and cultural heritage of persons participating in research, individually and collectively. It involves respecting the participants’ privacy, confidentiality, and cultural sensitivity. 8 Respect also entails giving adequate consideration to people to make their judgements throughout the study process. In cases where the participants have limited capacity to make autonomous decisions, respect for them entails protecting them against harm. 8 This means that all participants in research must participate voluntarily without coercion or undue influence, and their rights, dignity and autonomy should be respected and adequately protected.

Beneficence

The ethical principle that requires actions that promote the well-being and interests of others is known as beneficence. 10 It is the fundamental premise underlying all medical health care and research. 8 Beneficence requires the researcher to weigh the prospective benefits and hazards and make certain that projects have the potential for net benefit over harm. 8,10 Researchers are responsible for: (a) structuring the study to minimise the risks of injury or discomfort to participants; (b) explaining the possible benefits and dangers of the research to participants; and (c) the welfare of the participants in the research setting 8. Thus, the study participants must always be prioritised over the research methodology, even if this means invalidating data. 8

Non-maleficence

This is the ethical principle that requires actions that avoid or minimize harm to others. According to the principle of non-maleficence, participating in a study shouldn’t do any harm to the research subject. This principle is closely related to beneficence; however, it may be difficult to keep track of any damage to study participants. 11 Different types of harm could occur, including physical, mental, social, or financial harm. While the physical injury may be quickly recognised and then avoided or reduced, less evident issues such as emotional, social, and economic factors might hurt the subject without the researcher being aware. 11 It is essential to note that all research involve cost to participants even if just their time, and each research study has the potential to hurt participants, hence it is important to ensure that the merit of research outweighs the costs and risks. There are five categories into which studies may be categorised based on the possible amount of injury or discomfort that they may expose the participants to. 11

• No anticipated effects
• Temporary discomfort
• Unusual levels of temporary discomfort
• Risk of permanent damage
• Certainty of permanent damage

The concept of fairness and the application of moral principles to ensure equitable treatment. According to this research tenet, the researcher must treat participants fairly and always prioritise the needs of the research subjects over the study’s aim. 8,11 Research participants must be fairly chosen, and that exclusion and inclusion criteria must be accurately stated in the research’s findings. 8 In addition, there is no unjust hardship associated with participating in research on certain groups, and the participant recruitment method is fair. Furthermore, the rewards for research involvement are fairly distributed; research participants are not exploited, and research rewards are accessible to everybody equally. 8

An Introduction to Research Methods for Undergraduate Health Profession Students Copyright © 2023 by Faith Alele and Bunmi Malau-Aduli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

• U.S. Department of Health & Human Services

• Virtual Tour
• Staff Directory
• En Español

You are here

Nih clinical research trials and you, guiding principles for ethical research.

Pursuing Potential Research Participants Protections

“When people are invited to participate in research, there is a strong belief that it should be their choice based on their understanding of what the study is about, and what the risks and benefits of the study are,” said Dr. Christine Grady, chief of the NIH Clinical Center Department of Bioethics, to Clinical Center Radio in a podcast.

Clinical research advances the understanding of science and promotes human health. However, it is important to remember the individuals who volunteer to participate in research. There are precautions researchers can take – in the planning, implementation and follow-up of studies – to protect these participants in research. Ethical guidelines are established for clinical research to protect patient volunteers and to preserve the integrity of the science.

NIH Clinical Center researchers published seven main principles to guide the conduct of ethical research:

Social and clinical value

Scientific validity, fair subject selection, favorable risk-benefit ratio, independent review, informed consent.

• Respect for potential and enrolled subjects

Every research study is designed to answer a specific question. The answer should be important enough to justify asking people to accept some risk or inconvenience for others. In other words, answers to the research question should contribute to scientific understanding of health or improve our ways of preventing, treating, or caring for people with a given disease to justify exposing participants to the risk and burden of research.

A study should be designed in a way that will get an understandable answer to the important research question. This includes considering whether the question asked is answerable, whether the research methods are valid and feasible, and whether the study is designed with accepted principles, clear methods, and reliable practices. Invalid research is unethical because it is a waste of resources and exposes people to risk for no purpose

The primary basis for recruiting participants should be the scientific goals of the study — not vulnerability, privilege, or other unrelated factors. Participants who accept the risks of research should be in a position to enjoy its benefits. Specific groups of participants  (for example, women or children) should not be excluded from the research opportunities without a good scientific reason or a particular susceptibility to risk.

Uncertainty about the degree of risks and benefits associated with a clinical research study is inherent. Research risks may be trivial or serious, transient or long-term. Risks can be physical, psychological, economic, or social. Everything should be done to minimize the risks and inconvenience to research participants to maximize the potential benefits, and to determine that the potential benefits are proportionate to, or outweigh, the risks.

To minimize potential conflicts of interest and make sure a study is ethically acceptable before it starts, an independent review panel should review the proposal and ask important questions, including: Are those conducting the trial sufficiently free of bias? Is the study doing all it can to protect research participants? Has the trial been ethically designed and is the risk–benefit ratio favorable? The panel also monitors a study while it is ongoing.

Potential participants should make their own decision about whether they want to participate or continue participating in research. This is done through a process of informed consent in which individuals (1) are accurately informed of the purpose, methods, risks, benefits, and alternatives to the research, (2) understand this information and how it relates to their own clinical situation or interests, and (3) make a voluntary decision about whether to participate.

Respect for potential and enrolled participants

Individuals should be treated with respect from the time they are approached for possible participation — even if they refuse enrollment in a study — throughout their participation and after their participation ends. This includes:

• respecting their privacy and keeping their private information confidential
• respecting their right to change their mind, to decide that the research does not match their interests, and to withdraw without a penalty
• informing them of new information that might emerge in the course of research, which might change their assessment of the risks and benefits of participating
• monitoring their welfare and, if they experience adverse reactions, unexpected effects, or changes in clinical status, ensuring appropriate treatment and, when necessary, removal from the study
• informing them about what was learned from the research

More information on these seven guiding principles and on bioethics in general

This page last reviewed on March 16, 2016

Connect with Us

• More Social Media from NIH

• University of Michigan Library
• Research Guides

Science Ethics

• Research Ethics
• Guide Scope
• Data & Algorithmic Ethics
• Science & Social Justice
• Publication Errors
• Open Access (OA) Journals
• Preprint Manuscripts
• Predatory Publishing
• Responsible Conduct of Research and Scholarship (RCRS)
• Mathematics & Statistics
• Environment & Sustainability
• Earth Science

What is Research Ethics?

Research ethics is, broadly, a set of norms for conduct when undertaking research activity. Typically, however, major research institutions and agencies define research ethics as a set of principles for researchers. Some common principles are as follows:

• Scientific and Social Value - Research is designed to answer specified research question(s). Along these lines, research should adhere to their stated aims and contribute to the scientific body of knowledge on a topic; where appropriate, research should also benefit participants through contributions to the scientific record.
• Scientific Validity  - Experiments and studies should be designed to get an understandable answer to their questions. This means researchers should consider whether their questions have answers, if their results will be valid, and if their designs follow accepted methodologies.
• Informed Consent  - Researchers working with human participants should accurately describe research activities to potential participants, including methods, risks, benefits, and alternative options and allow each individual to make a voluntary decision on whether or not to participate.
• Appropriate Risk-Benefit Ratio  - Uncertainty about the risks of research activity may vary over time for a study; however, at each step of an experiment researchers should minimize the risks and maximize the benefits associated with their work.
• Respect for Participants  - For those working with human subjects participant privacy, decisions, and debriefing should be of the utmost importance. This means researchers should prioritize keeping shared information confidential and private, respect participants' rights to change their minds, and share developments and findings from the research with all involved.
• Peer Review  - The scientific community should hold research plans, activities, and products to the highest standards, having peers of researcher(s) ensuring that each step minimizes conflicts of interest and potential risks for those involved.

Key Considerations for Research Ethics

• Who benefits from the products of research? What resources does the research consume? Is there a way to widen the applicability of the research?
• Who/what are the funding sources for research? What are the motives for supporting the research?
• Where and how are the tools for research (lab equipment, supplies, computers) being produced? Is the production process harmful to the communities making the tools?
• What are the risks and benefits for those involved (especially participants) in the research?
• Is the research methodology sound? Will peers in the field see it as valid?

Recommended Resources

Connections between Social Justice and Scientific Research. (2019, September 10). Environmental Center. https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/connections-between-social-justice-and-scientific-research

Guiding Principles for Ethical Research. (2016, March 16). National Institutes of Health (NIH). https://www.nih.gov/health-information/nih-clinical-research-trials-you/guiding-principles-ethical-research

Responsible and Ethical Conduct of Research (RECR). (n.d.). National Science Foundation. Retrieved October 27, 2023, from https://www.nsf.gov/od/recr.jsp

What is Ethics in Research and Why is it Important?

This article defines ethics in research, including codes and policies, and demonstrates the importance of ethics in research.

Research Ethics.ca

What Is Research Ethics?

What is Research Ethics? by Nancy Walton, Ph.D. Research that involves human subjects or participants raises unique and complex ethical, legal, social and political issues. Research ethics is specifically interested in the analysis of ethical issues that are raised when people are involved as participants in research. There are three objectives in research ethics. Thefirst and broadest objective is to protect human participants. The second objective is to ensure that research is conducted in a way that serves interests of individuals, groups and/or society as a whole. Finally, the third objective is to examine specific research activities and projects for their ethical soundness, looking at issues such as the management of risk, protection of confidentiality and the process of informed consent.

For the most part, research ethics has traditionally focused on issues in biomedical research. The application of research ethics to examine and evaluate biomedical research has been well developed over the last century and has influenced much of the existing statutes and guidelines for the ethical conduct of research. However in humanities and social science research, different kinds of ethical issues arise. New and emerging methods of conducting research, such as auto-ethnography and participatory action research raise important but markedly different ethical issues and obligations for researchers.

Research involving vulnerable persons, which may include children, persons with developmental or cognitive disabilities, persons who are institutionalized, the homeless or those without legal status, also raises unique issues in any research context.

Research ethicists everywhere today are challenged by issues that reflect global concerns in other domains, such as the conduct of research in developing countries, the limits of research involving genetic material and the protection of privacy in light of advances in technology and Internet capabilities.

In Canada, current debates and challenges in research ethics include the changing notions of what constitutes research and therefore requires formal ethics review, the oversight and monitoring of the work of Research Ethics Boards (known as Institutional Review Boards, in the U.S.) at federal and provincial levels, the jurisdiction of Research Ethics Boards in academic, clinical and corporate settings, the increasing multidisciplinarity of research collaborations and pursuits and challenges created by rigorous federal and provincial privacy legislation. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the kinds of live issues there are in research ethics today. Aside from the epistemological and philosophical issues in this dynamic field, research ethicists also face anecdotal issues at the level of individual research ethics reviews, systemic issues related to the institutions in which research ethics reviews are carried out and social, legal and political issues related to governance and oversight of research ethics activities.

Share this:

• Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
• Subscribe Subscribed
• Copy shortlink
• Report this content
• View post in Reader
• Manage subscriptions
• Collapse this bar

• Research Ethics

Featured in:

Research ethics provides researchers with the guidelines to conduct their research responsibly. Furthermore, research ethics committees monitor and educate researchers to ensure that high ethical standards are kept throughout the research process. Generally, research ethics focuses on the analysis of ethical concerns that come up when people are involved in a particular research.

Objectives of research ethics

Research ethics has three objectives, which include:

• Protecting human participants;
• Ensuring that research is done in a manner which serves the interests of people, groups or society; and
• Examining research projects and activities for their ethical standards, checking for things like risk management, safeguarding of confidentiality and the procedure of informed consent.

For a long period, research ethics has mainly focused on issues concerning biomedical research. The use of ethical research in examining and evaluating biomedical research was developed many years ago, and it has affected some of the existing guidelines and statutes governing ethical conduct of research. However, different types of ethical issues pop up when it comes to humanities and social science research.

Today, there are new and emerging ways of conducting research, like participatory action and auto-ethnography research that raise a critical, but distinctly different ethical concerns and obligations for researchers. Additionally, research that involves vulnerable groups of people, such as people who are institutionalized, people with cognitive or developmental disabilities, children, people without legal status or the homeless also raises concerns in any research context.

The principles of research ethics

Undeniably, researchers face several ethical requirements. Every researcher must meet the set institutional, federal and professional standards for conducting research that involves human participants. The following are some of the general research ethics:

• Honesty –  researchers should honestly report data, research methods, and procedures, results, and publication status. Never falsify, fabricate or misrepresent data.
• Objectivity – always aim to avoid biases in experimental design, data analysis and interpretation, personal decisions, expert testimony, peer review and all other aspects of research.
• Integrity –  do not act contrary to your promises and agreements. Do your research with sincerity and endeavor for regularity of thought and action.
• Carefulness – avoid negligence and making careless errors. Ensure that you carefully and critically scrutinize your work as well as the work of your friends. It is always good to keep the records for every research activity.
• Respecting intellectual property – always respect copyrights, patents and any other type of intellectual property. Never use unreleased data, methods or results without consent. Never plagiarize, and always give credit where it is due.
• Confidentiality – safeguard confidential information like personal information, military or trade secrets, and patient records. Never disclose any of this information without the necessary permission.

408,000 + job opportunities

Not yet a member? Sign Up

join cleverism

Find your dream job. Get on promotion fasstrack and increase tour lifetime salary.

Post your jobs & get access to millions of ambitious, well-educated talents that are going the extra mile.

First name*

Company name*

Company Website*

E-mail (work)*

Login or Register

Password reset instructions will be sent to your E-mail.

Understanding ethics approval in academic research

The following strategies aim to streamline the ethics approval process, reduce delays and uphold the highest ethical standards

Marios Kremantzis

.css-76pyzs{margin-right:0.25rem;} ,, fatema zaghloul, rushana khusainova.

• More on this topic

Created in partnership with

You may also like

Popular resources

.css-1txxx8u{overflow:hidden;max-height:81px;text-indent:0px;} Change is coming, whether higher education likes it or not

Ai and assessment redesign: a four-step process, is it worth paying for genai, emotions and learning: what role do emotions play in how and why students learn, use ai to get your students thinking critically.

Ethical considerations are foundational to the integrity and validity of scholarly work, guiding researchers to conduct studies that are academically sound and morally responsible. Securing ethics approval is critical for group or individual research projects at any academic level. This process ensures the research respects and protects participants' rights, dignity and welfare.

However, students and supervisors often face challenges that can delay or obstruct approval, such as a lack of understanding of ethical guidelines and inadequate preparation of ethics applications. Students might struggle with articulating study risks and benefits or ensuring data confidentiality, especially in research involving vulnerable populations or sensitive topics. Supervisors may find it difficult to guide students through ethical research practices while balancing academic rigour and ethical responsibility .

Common problems in ethics applications

Documentation and consent issues: the omission of crucial documents (eg, participant information sheets, consent forms, questionnaires or interview guides) is a common oversight. These documents are crucial for informing participants about the research and securing their informed consent.

“Respect for persons” entails acknowledging the autonomy of all participants, obtaining informed consent and ensuring that they are fully aware of their rights to withdraw from the study at any point. 

Privacy and security concerns: failing to mention which online tools will be used for video interviews can lead to ethical and technical issues. It is essential to specify platforms to ensure they meet privacy and security standards. When researchers do not disclose the specific platforms they intend to use, they risk compromising the confidentiality and security of participant data. 

Ethical issues arise when participants are not adequately informed about how their data will be collected, stored and protected. This lack of transparency can undermine the trust between researchers and participants, potentially leading to a reluctance to participate or the withdrawal of consent. 

Project clarity and methodological details: despite the fact that ambiguity can result in misunderstandings about the research aims, methods and potential impacts, applications often lack a clear description of the project. Without this, ethics review boards cannot accurately assess the ethical implications of the research.

Applications frequently lack details about methodological choices, such as research instruments, data collection processes and sampling strategies. Clear, detailed methodologies are necessary to evaluate the ethical implications fully. 

Power dynamics and confidentiality: some students overlook power dynamics and gatekeeping issues. For example, recruiting staff members through line managers can introduce significant power imbalances. Ensuring anonymity and confidentiality is also often inadequately addressed. 

Software and data analysis: the lack of specifics regarding software tools for data analysis and storage can be problematic. Researchers must provide details about the tools to be used to ensure they comply with ethical standards. 

Primary and secondary data use: there is often a lack of understanding regarding the differences between primary and secondary data. Some students fail to specify the databases they intend to use or attempt to use non-subscribed databases.

Supervisor review and endorsement: there have been instances where forms lack the supervisor’s signature. This indicates that the application has not been thoroughly reviewed and endorsed by a faculty member. 

Data storage and security: students sometimes fail to mention how they will store their primary data securely, which is essential for protecting participant confidentiality. Secure data storage practices are vital for preventing unauthorised access and ensuring that data is preserved accurately and ethically. 

• Resource collection: Research excellence: what is it and how can universities achieve it?
• How to add value to research and manage intellectual property
• A model for maximising the impact of small research units

Strategies for overcoming obstacles

To address these common problems, we can implement several effective strategies:

Developing and distributing standardised checklists: supervisors can use these when reviewing student applications to ensure all essential components are included and identify missing elements quickly. These checklists should cover participant information, consent forms, specified tools for data collection and data storage plans. 

Integrating checklists into the university’s research ethics management system: this would streamline the review process, enabling supervisors to ensure all criteria are met before approving applications. By configuring the system to recognise primary data collection, it can mandate attaching relevant files (eg, recruitment materials and participant information sheets). 

Creating a centralised repository of resources: this should include exemplary ethics applications submitted and approved in the past, which would provide supervisors and students with clear examples of best practices. 

Offering training sessions and workshops on ethical research practices: this helps students and supervisors understand and address ethical considerations in their applications. The dissertation handbook should include detailed guidelines on ethical research. Consistent online training should be provided for staff and students before and during the initial months of the dissertation process. These sessions should cover topics such as informed consent, confidentiality and managing sensitive data. Additionally, incorporating case studies and real-life scenarios in these workshops provides practical insights into handling ethical dilemmas effectively. 

Providing clear guidelines on the use of software tools and data sources: including a list of approved databases and platforms can prevent confusion and ensure compliance with institutional policies. 

Addressing ethics application issues proactively streamlines the approval process, enhances research quality and upholds ethical standards. Informing and preparing students and supervisors fosters an ethical research environment, while comprehensive resources empower researchers to navigate challenges responsibly and with integrity. 

Marios Kremantzis and Fatema Zaghloul are lecturers in business analytics and Rushana Khusainova is a senior lecturer in marketing at the University of Bristol Business School.

If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week,  sign up for the Campus newsletter .

The iScanner app supports the academic community in information sharing and management

Change is coming, whether higher education likes it or not, a diy guide to starting your own journal, artificial intelligence and academic integrity: striking a balance, upgrade your teaching: four instant improvement tips, contextual learning: linking learning to the real world.

Register for free

and unlock a host of features on the THE site

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Springer Nature - PMC COVID-19 Collection

Ethical Issues in Research: Perceptions of Researchers, Research Ethics Board Members and Research Ethics Experts

Marie-josée drolet.

1 Department of Occupational Therapy (OT), Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR), Trois-Rivières (Québec), Canada

Eugénie Rose-Derouin

2 Bachelor OT program, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR), Trois-Rivières (Québec), Canada

Julie-Claude Leblanc

Mélanie ruest, bryn williams-jones.

3 Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, School of Public Health, Université de Montréal, Montréal (Québec), Canada

In the context of academic research, a diversity of ethical issues, conditioned by the different roles of members within these institutions, arise. Previous studies on this topic addressed mainly the perceptions of researchers. However, to our knowledge, no studies have explored the transversal ethical issues from a wider spectrum, including other members of academic institutions as the research ethics board (REB) members, and the research ethics experts. The present study used a descriptive phenomenological approach to document the ethical issues experienced by a heterogeneous group of Canadian researchers, REB members, and research ethics experts. Data collection involved socio-demographic questionnaires and individual semi-structured interviews. Following the triangulation of different perspectives (researchers, REB members and ethics experts), emerging ethical issues were synthesized in ten units of meaning: (1) research integrity, (2) conflicts of interest, (3) respect for research participants, (4) lack of supervision and power imbalances, (5) individualism and performance, (6) inadequate ethical guidance, (7) social injustices, (8) distributive injustices, (9) epistemic injustices, and (10) ethical distress. This study highlighted several problematic elements that can support the identification of future solutions to resolve transversal ethical issues in research that affect the heterogeneous members of the academic community.

Introduction

Research includes a set of activities in which researchers use various structured methods to contribute to the development of knowledge, whether this knowledge is theoretical, fundamental, or applied (Drolet & Ruest, accepted ). University research is carried out in a highly competitive environment that is characterized by ever-increasing demands (i.e., on time, productivity), insufficient access to research funds, and within a market economy that values productivity and speed often to the detriment of quality or rigour – this research context creates a perfect recipe for breaches in research ethics, like research misbehaviour or misconduct (i.e., conduct that is ethically questionable or unacceptable because it contravenes the accepted norms of responsible conduct of research or compromises the respect of core ethical values that are widely held by the research community) (Drolet & Girard, 2020 ; Sieber, 2004 ). Problematic ethics and integrity issues – e.g., conflicts of interest, falsification of data, non-respect of participants’ rights, and plagiarism, to name but a few – have the potential to both undermine the credibility of research and lead to negative consequences for many stakeholders, including researchers, research assistants and personnel, research participants, academic institutions, and society as a whole (Drolet & Girard, 2020 ). It is thus evident that the academic community should be able to identify these different ethical issues in order to evaluate the nature of the risks that they pose (and for whom), and then work towards their prevention or management (i.e., education, enhanced policies and procedures, risk mitigation strategies).

In this article, we define an “ethical issue” as any situation that may compromise, in whole or in part, the respect of at least one moral value (Swisher et al., 2005 ) that is considered socially legitimate and should thus be respected. In general, ethical issues occur at three key moments or stages of the research process: (1) research design (i.e., conception, project planning), (2) research conduct (i.e., data collection, data analysis) and (3) knowledge translation or communication (e.g., publications of results, conferences, press releases) (Drolet & Ruest, accepted ). According to Sieber ( 2004 ), ethical issues in research can be classified into five categories, related to: (a) communication with participants and the community, (b) acquisition and use of research data, (c) external influence on research, (d) risks and benefits of the research, and (e) selection and use of research theories and methods. Many of these issues are related to breaches of research ethics norms, misbehaviour or research misconduct. Bruhn et al., ( 2002 ) developed a typology of misbehaviour and misconduct in academia that can be used to judge the seriousness of different cases. This typology takes into consideration two axes of reflection: (a) the origin of the situation (i.e., is it the researcher’s own fault or due to the organizational context?), and (b) the scope and severity (i.e., is this the first instance or a recurrent behaviour? What is the nature of the situation? What are the consequences, for whom, for how many people, and for which organizations?).

A previous detailed review of the international literature on ethical issues in research revealed several interesting findings (Beauchemin et al., 2021 ). Indeed, the current literature is dominated by descriptive ethics, i.e., the sharing by researchers from various disciplines of the ethical issues they have personally experienced. While such anecdotal documentation is relevant, it is insufficient because it does not provide a global view of the situation. Among the reviewed literature, empirical studies were in the minority (Table  1 ) – only about one fifth of the sample (n = 19) presented empirical research findings on ethical issues in research. The first of these studies was conducted almost 50 years ago (Hunt et al., 1984 ), with the remainder conducted in the 1990s. Eight studies were conducted in the United States (n = 8), five in Canada (n = 5), three in England (n = 3), two in Sweden (n = 2) and one in Ghana (n = 1).

Summary of Empirical Studies on Ethical Issues in Research by the year of publication

Further, the majority of studies in our sample (n = 12) collected the perceptions of a homogeneous group of participants, usually researchers (n = 14) and sometimes health professionals (n = 6). A minority of studies (n = 7) triangulated the perceptions of diverse research stakeholders (i.e., researchers and research participants, or students). To our knowledge, only one study has examined perceptions of ethical issues in research by research ethics board members (REB; Institutional Review Boards [IRB] in the USA), and none to date have documented the perceptions of research ethics experts. Finally, nine studies (n = 9) adopted a qualitative design, seven studies (n = 7) a quantitative design, and three (n = 3) a mixed-methods design.

More studies using empirical research methods are needed to better identify broader trends, to enrich discussions on the values that should govern responsible conduct of research in the academic community, and to evaluate the means by which these values can be supported in practice (Bahn, 2012 ; Beauchemin et al., 2021 ; Bruhn et al., 2002 ; Henderson et al., 2013 ; Resnik & Elliot, 2016; Sieber 2004 ). To this end, we conducted an empirical qualitative study to document the perceptions and experiences of a heterogeneous group of Canadian researchers, REB members, and research ethics experts, to answer the following broad question: What are the ethical issues in research?

Research Methods

Research design.

A qualitative research approach involving individual semi-structured interviews was used to systematically document ethical issues (De Poy & Gitlin, 2010 ; Hammell et al., 2000 ). Specifically, a descriptive phenomenological approach inspired by the philosophy of Husserl was used (Husserl, 1970 , 1999 ), as it is recommended for documenting the perceptions of ethical issues raised by various practices (Hunt & Carnavale, 2011 ).

Ethical considerations

The principal investigator obtained ethics approval for this project from the Research Ethics Board of the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR). All members of the research team signed a confidentiality agreement, and research participants signed the consent form after reading an information letter explaining the nature of the research project.

Sampling and recruitment

As indicated above, three types of participants were sought: (1) researchers from different academic disciplines conducting research (i.e., theoretical, fundamental or empirical) in Canadian universities; (2) REB members working in Canadian organizations responsible for the ethical review, oversight or regulation of research; and (3) research ethics experts, i.e., academics or ethicists who teach research ethics, conduct research in research ethics, or are scholars who have acquired a specialization in research ethics. To be included in the study, participants had to work in Canada, speak and understand English or French, and be willing to participate in the study. Following Thomas and Polio’s (2002) recommendation to recruit between six and twelve participants (for a homogeneous sample) to ensure data saturation, for our heterogeneous sample, we aimed to recruit approximately twelve participants in order to obtain data saturation. Having used this method several times in related projects in professional ethics, data saturation is usually achieved with 10 to 15 participants (Drolet & Goulet, 2018 ; Drolet & Girard, 2020 ; Drolet et al., 2020 ). From experience, larger samples only serve to increase the degree of data saturation, especially in heterogeneous samples (Drolet et al., 2017 , 2019 ; Drolet & Maclure, 2016 ).

Purposive sampling facilitated the identification of participants relevant to documenting the phenomenon in question (Fortin, 2010 ). To ensure a rich and most complete representation of perceptions, we sought participants with varied and complementary characteristics with regards to the social roles they occupy in research practice (Drolet & Girard, 2020 ). A triangulation of sources was used for the recruitment (Bogdan & Biklen, 2006 ). The websites of Canadian universities and Canadian health institution REBs, as well as those of major Canadian granting agencies (i.e., the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Fonds de recherche du Quebec), were searched to identify individuals who might be interested in participating in the study. Further, people known by the research team for their knowledge and sensitivity to ethical issues in research were asked to participate. Research participants were also asked to suggest other individuals who met the study criteria.

Data Collection

Two tools were used for data collecton: (a) a socio-demographic questionnaire, and (b) a semi-structured individual interview guide. English and French versions of these two documents were used and made available, depending on participant preferences. In addition, although the interview guide contained the same questions, they were adapted to participants’ specific roles (i.e., researcher, REB member, research ethics expert). When contacted by email by the research assistant, participants were asked to confirm under which role they wished to participate (because some participants might have multiple, overlapping responsibilities) and they were sent the appropriate interview guide.

The interview guides each had two parts: an introduction and a section on ethical issues. The introduction consisted of general questions to put the participant at ease (i.e., “Tell me what a typical day at work is like for you”). The section on ethical issues was designed to capture the participant’s perceptions through questions such as: “Tell me three stories you have experienced at work that involve an ethical issue?” and “Do you feel that your organization is doing enough to address, manage, and resolve ethical issues in your work?”. Although some interviews were conducted in person, the majority were conducted by videoconference to promote accessibility and because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Interviews were digitally recorded so that the verbatim could be transcribed in full, and varied between 40 and 120 min in duration, with an average of 90 min. Research assistants conducted the interviews and transcribed the verbatim.

Data Analysis

The socio-demographic questionnaires were subjected to simple descriptive statistical analyses (i.e., means and totals), and the semi-structured interviews were subjected to qualitative analysis. The steps proposed by Giorgi ( 1997 ) for a Husserlian phenomenological reduction of the data were used. After collecting, recording, and transcribing the interviews, all verbatim were analyzed by at least two analysts: a research assistant (2nd author of this article) and the principal investigator (1st author) or a postdoctoral fellow (3rd author). The repeated reading of the verbatim allowed the first analyst to write a synopsis, i.e., an initial extraction of units of meaning. The second analyst then read the synopses, which were commented and improved if necessary. Agreement between analysts allowed the final drafting of the interview synopses, which were then analyzed by three analysts to generate and organize the units of meaning that emerged from the qualitative data.

Participants

Sixteen individuals (n = 16) participated in the study, of whom nine (9) identified as female and seven (7) as male (Table  2 ). Participants ranged in age from 22 to 72 years, with a mean age of 47.5 years. Participants had between one (1) and 26 years of experience in the research setting, with an average of 14.3 years of experience. Participants held a variety of roles, including: REB members (n = 11), researchers (n = 10), research ethics experts (n = 4), and research assistant (n = 1). As mentioned previously, seven (7) participants held more than one role, i.e., REB member, research ethics expert, and researcher. The majority (87.5%) of participants were working in Quebec, with the remaining working in other Canadian provinces. Although all participants considered themselves to be francophone, one quarter (n = 4) identified themselves as belonging to a cultural minority group.

Description of Participants

With respect to their academic background, most participants (n = 9) had a PhD, three (3) had a post-doctorate, two (2) had a master’s degree, and two (2) had a bachelor’s degree. Participants came from a variety of disciplines: nine (9) had a specialty in the humanities or social sciences, four (4) in the health sciences and three (3) in the natural sciences. In terms of their knowledge of ethics, five (5) participants reported having taken one university course entirely dedicated to ethics, four (4) reported having taken several university courses entirely dedicated to ethics, three (3) had a university degree dedicated to ethics, while two (2) only had a few hours or days of training in ethics and two (2) reported having no knowledge of ethics.

Ethical issues

As Fig.  1 illustrates, ten units of meaning emerge from the data analysis, namely: (1) research integrity, (2) conflicts of interest, (3) respect for research participants, (4) lack of supervision and power imbalances, (5) individualism and performance, (6) inadequate ethical guidance, (7) social injustices, (8) distributive injustices, (9) epistemic injustices, and (10) ethical distress. To illustrate the results, excerpts from verbatim interviews are presented in the following sub-sections. Most of the excerpts have been translated into English as the majority of interviews were conducted with French-speaking participants.

Ethical issues in research according to the participants

Research Integrity

The research environment is highly competitive and performance-based. Several participants, in particular researchers and research ethics experts, felt that this environment can lead both researchers and research teams to engage in unethical behaviour that reflects a lack of research integrity. For example, as some participants indicated, competition for grants and scientific publications is sometimes so intense that researchers falsify research results or plagiarize from colleagues to achieve their goals.

Some people will lie or exaggerate their research findings in order to get funding. Then, you see it afterwards, you realize: “ah well, it didn’t work, but they exaggerated what they found and what they did” (participant 14). Another problem in research is the identification of authors when there is a publication. Very often, there are authors who don’t even know what the publication is about and that their name is on it. (…) The time that it surprised me the most was just a few months ago when I saw someone I knew who applied for a teaching position. He got it I was super happy for him. Then I looked at his publications and … there was one that caught my attention much more than the others, because I was in it and I didn’t know what that publication was. I was the second author of a publication that I had never read (participant 14). I saw a colleague who had plagiarized another colleague. [When the colleague] found out about it, he complained. So, plagiarism is a serious [ethical breach]. I would also say that there is a certain amount of competition in the university faculties, especially for grants (…). There are people who want to win at all costs or get as much as possible. They are not necessarily going to consider their colleagues. They don’t have much of a collegial spirit (participant 10).

These examples of research misbehaviour or misconduct are sometimes due to or associated with situations of conflicts of interest, which may be poorly managed by certain researchers or research teams, as noted by many participants.

Conflict of interest

The actors and institutions involved in research have diverse interests, like all humans and institutions. As noted in Chap. 7 of the Canadian Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (TCPS2, 2018),

“researchers and research students hold trust relationships, either directly or indirectly, with participants, research sponsors, institutions, their professional bodies and society. These trust relationships can be put at risk by conflicts of interest that may compromise independence, objectivity or ethical duties of loyalty. Although the potential for such conflicts has always existed, pressures on researchers (i.e., to delay or withhold dissemination of research outcomes or to use inappropriate recruitment strategies) heighten concerns that conflicts of interest may affect ethical behaviour” (p. 92).

The sources of these conflicts are varied and can include interpersonal conflicts, financial partnerships, third-party pressures, academic or economic interests, a researcher holding multiple roles within an institution, or any other incentive that may compromise a researcher’s independence, integrity, and neutrality (TCPS2, 2018). While it is not possible to eliminate all conflicts of interest, it is important to manage them properly and to avoid temptations to behave unethically.

Ethical temptations correspond to situations in which people are tempted to prioritize their own interests to the detriment of the ethical goods that should, in their own context, govern their actions (Swisher et al., 2005 ). In the case of researchers, this refers to situations that undermine independence, integrity, neutrality, or even the set of principles that govern research ethics (TCPS2, 2018) or the responsible conduct of research. According to study participants, these types of ethical issues frequently occur in research. Many participants, especially researchers and REB members, reported that conflicts of interest can arise when members of an organization make decisions to obtain large financial rewards or to increase their academic profile, often at the expense of the interests of members of their research team, research participants, or even the populations affected by their research.

A company that puts money into making its drug work wants its drug to work. So, homeopathy is a good example, because there are not really any consequences of homeopathy, there are not very many side effects, because there are no effects at all. So, it’s not dangerous, but it’s not a good treatment either. But some people will want to make it work. And that’s a big issue when you’re sitting at a table and there are eight researchers, and there are two or three who are like that, and then there are four others who are neutral, and I say to myself, this is not science. I think that this is a very big ethical issue (participant 14). There are also times in some research where there will be more links with pharmaceutical companies. Obviously, there are then large amounts of money that will be very interesting for the health-care institutions because they still receive money for clinical trials. They’re still getting some compensation because its time consuming for the people involved and all that. The pharmaceutical companies have money, so they will compensate, and that is sometimes interesting for the institutions, and since we are a bit caught up in this, in the sense that we have no choice but to accept it. (…) It may not be the best research in the world, there may be a lot of side effects due to the drugs, but it’s good to accept it, we’re going to be part of the clinical trial (participant 3). It is integrity, what we believe should be done or said. Often by the pressure of the environment, integrity is in tension with the pressures of the environment, so it takes resistance, it takes courage in research. (…) There were all the debates there about the problems of research that was funded and then the companies kept control over what was written. That was really troubling for a lot of researchers (participant 5).

Further, these situations sometimes have negative consequences for research participants as reported by some participants.

Respect for research participants

Many research projects, whether they are psychosocial or biomedical in nature, involve human participants. Relationships between the members of research teams and their research participants raise ethical issues that can be complex. Research projects must always be designed to respect the rights and interests of research participants, and not just those of researchers. However, participants in our study – i.e., REB members, researchers, and research ethics experts – noted that some research teams seem to put their own interests ahead of those of research participants. They also emphasized the importance of ensuring the respect, well-being, and safety of research participants. The ethical issues related to this unit of meaning are: respect for free, informed and ongoing consent of research participants; respect for and the well-being of participants; data protection and confidentiality; over-solicitation of participants; ownership of the data collected on participants; the sometimes high cost of scientific innovations and their accessibility; balance between the social benefits of research and the risks to participants (particularly in terms of safety); balance between collective well-being (development of knowledge) and the individual rights of participants; exploitation of participants; paternalism when working with populations in vulnerable situations; and the social acceptability of certain types of research. The following excerpts present some of these issues.

Where it disturbs me ethically is in the medical field – because it’s more in the medical field that we’re going to see this – when consent forms are presented to patients to solicit them as participants, and then [these forms] have an average of 40 pages. That annoys me. When they say that it has to be easy to understand and all that, adapted to the language, and then the hyper-technical language plus there are 40 pages to read, I don’t understand how you’re going to get informed consent after reading 40 pages. (…) For me, it doesn’t work. I read them to evaluate them and I have a certain level of education and experience in ethics, and there are times when I don’t understand anything (participant 2). There is a lot of pressure from researchers who want to recruit research participants (…). The idea that when you enter a health care institution, you become a potential research participant, when you say “yes to a research, you check yes to all research”, then everyone can ask you. I think that researchers really have this fantasy of saying to themselves: “as soon as people walk through the door of our institution, they become potential participants with whom we can communicate and get them involved in all projects”. There’s a kind of idea that, yes, it can be done, but it has to be somewhat supervised to avoid over-solicitation (…). Researchers are very interested in facilitating recruitment and making it more fluid, but perhaps to the detriment of confidentiality, privacy, and respect; sometimes that’s what it is, to think about what type of data you’re going to have in your bank of potential participants? Is it just name and phone number or are you getting into more sensitive information? (participant 9).

In addition, one participant reported that their university does not provide the resources required to respect the confidentiality of research participants.

The issue is as follows: researchers, of course, commit to protecting data with passwords and all that, but we realize that in practice, it is more difficult. It is not always as protected as one might think, because professor-researchers will run out of space. Will the universities make rooms available to researchers, places where they can store these things, especially when they have paper documentation, and is there indeed a guarantee of confidentiality? Some researchers have told me: “Listen; there are even filing cabinets in the corridors”. So, that certainly poses a concrete challenge. How do we go about challenging the administrative authorities? Tell them it’s all very well to have an ethics committee, but you have to help us, you also have to make sure that the necessary infrastructures are in place so that what we are proposing is really put into practice (participant 4).

If the relationships with research participants are likely to raise ethical issues, so too are the relationships with students, notably research assistants. On this topic, several participants discussed the lack of supervision or recognition offered to research assistants by researchers as well as the power imbalances between members of the research team.

Lack of Supervision and Power Imbalances

Many research teams are composed not only of researchers, but also of students who work as research assistants. The relationship between research assistants and other members of research teams can sometimes be problematic and raise ethical issues, particularly because of the inevitable power asymmetries. In the context of this study, several participants – including a research assistant, REB members, and researchers – discussed the lack of supervision or recognition of the work carried out by students, psychological pressure, and the more or less well-founded promises that are sometimes made to students. Participants also mentioned the exploitation of students by certain research teams, which manifest when students are inadequately paid, i.e., not reflective of the number of hours actually worked, not a fair wage, or even a wage at all.

[As a research assistant], it was more of a feeling of distress that I felt then because I didn’t know what to do. (…) I was supposed to get coaching or be supported, but I didn’t get anything in the end. It was like, “fix it by yourself”. (…) All research assistants were supposed to be supervised, but in practice they were not (participant 1). Very often, we have a master’s or doctoral student that we put on a subject and we consider that the project will be well done, while the student is learning. So, it happens that the student will do a lot of work and then we realize that the work is poorly done, and it is not necessarily the student’s fault. He wasn’t necessarily well supervised. There are directors who have 25 students, and they just don’t supervise them (participant 14). I think it’s really the power relationship. I thought to myself, how I saw my doctorate, the beginning of my research career, I really wanted to be in that laboratory, but they are the ones who are going to accept me or not, so what do I do to be accepted? I finally accept their conditions [which was to work for free]. If these are the conditions that are required to enter this lab, I want to go there. So, what do I do, well I accepted. It doesn’t make sense, but I tell myself that I’m still privileged, because I don’t have so many financial worries, one more reason to work for free, even though it doesn’t make sense (participant 1). In research, we have research assistants. (…). The fact of using people… so that’s it, you have to take into account where they are, respect them, but at the same time they have to show that they are there for the research. In English, we say “carry” or take care of people. With research assistants, this is often a problem that I have observed: for grant machines, the person is the last to be found there. Researchers, who will take, use student data, without giving them the recognition for it (participant 5). The problem at our university is that they reserve funding for Canadian students. The doctoral clientele in my field is mostly foreign students. So, our students are poorly funded. I saw one student end up in the shelter, in a situation of poverty. It ended very badly for him because he lacked financial resources. Once you get into that dynamic, it’s very hard to get out. I was made aware of it because the director at the time had taken him under her wing and wanted to try to find a way to get him out of it. So, most of my students didn’t get funded (participant 16). There I wrote “manipulation”, but it’s kind of all promises all the time. I, for example, was promised a lot of advancement, like when I got into the lab as a graduate student, it was said that I had an interest in [this particular area of research]. I think there are a lot of graduate students who must have gone through that, but it is like, “Well, your CV has to be really good, if you want to do a lot of things and big things. If you do this, if you do this research contract, the next year you could be the coordinator of this part of the lab and supervise this person, get more contracts, be paid more. Let’s say: you’ll be invited to go to this conference, this big event”. They were always dangling something, but you have to do that first to get there. But now, when you’ve done that, you have to do this business. It’s like a bit of manipulation, I think. That was very hard to know who is telling the truth and who is not (participant 1).

These ethical issues have significant negative consequences for students. Indeed, they sometimes find themselves at the mercy of researchers, for whom they work, struggling to be recognized and included as authors of an article, for example, or to receive the salary that they are due. For their part, researchers also sometimes find themselves trapped in research structures that can negatively affect their well-being. As many participants reported, researchers work in organizations that set very high productivity standards and in highly competitive contexts, all within a general culture characterized by individualism.

Individualism and performance

Participants, especially researchers, discussed the culture of individualism and performance that characterizes the academic environment. In glorifying excellence, some universities value performance and productivity, often at the expense of psychological well-being and work-life balance (i.e., work overload and burnout). Participants noted that there are ethical silences in their organizations on this issue, and that the culture of individualism and performance is not challenged for fear of retribution or simply to survive, i.e., to perform as expected. Participants felt that this culture can have a significant negative impact on the quality of the research conducted, as research teams try to maximize the quantity of their work (instead of quality) in a highly competitive context, which is then exacerbated by a lack of resources and support, and where everything must be done too quickly.

The work-life balance with the professional ethics related to work in a context where you have too much and you have to do a lot, it is difficult to balance all that and there is a lot of pressure to perform. If you don’t produce enough, that’s it; after that, you can’t get any more funds, so that puts pressure on you to do more and more and more (participant 3). There is a culture, I don’t know where it comes from, and that is extremely bureaucratic. If you dare to raise something, you’re going to have many, many problems. They’re going to make you understand it. So, I don’t talk. It is better: your life will be easier. I think there are times when you have to talk (…) because there are going to be irreparable consequences. (…) I’m not talking about a climate of terror, because that’s exaggerated, it’s not true, people are not afraid. But people close their office door and say nothing because it’s going to make their work impossible and they’re not going to lose their job, they’re not going to lose money, but researchers need time to be focused, so they close their office door and say nothing (participant 16).

Researchers must produce more and more, and they feel little support in terms of how to do such production, ethically, and how much exactly they are expected to produce. As this participant reports, the expectation is an unspoken rule: more is always better.

It’s sometimes the lack of a clear line on what the expectations are as a researcher, like, “ah, we don’t have any specific expectations, but produce, produce, produce, produce.” So, in that context, it’s hard to be able to put the line precisely: “have I done enough for my work?” (participant 3).

Inadequate ethical Guidance

While the productivity expectation is not clear, some participants – including researchers, research ethics experts, and REB members – also felt that the ethical expectations of some REBs were unclear. The issue of the inadequate ethical guidance of research includes the administrative mechanisms to ensure that research projects respect the principles of research ethics. According to those participants, the forms required for both researchers and REB members are increasingly long and numerous, and one participant noted that the standards to be met are sometimes outdated and disconnected from the reality of the field. Multicentre ethics review (by several REBs) was also critiqued by a participant as an inefficient method that encumbers the processes for reviewing research projects. Bureaucratization imposes an ever-increasing number of forms and ethics guidelines that actually hinder researchers’ ethical reflection on the issues at stake, leading the ethics review process to be perceived as purely bureaucratic in nature.

The ethical dimension and the ethical review of projects have become increasingly bureaucratized. (…) When I first started working (…) it was less bureaucratic, less strict then. I would say [there are now] tons of forms to fill out. Of course, we can’t do without it, it’s one of the ways of marking out ethics and ensuring that there are ethical considerations in research, but I wonder if it hasn’t become too bureaucratized, so that it’s become a kind of technical reflex to fill out these forms, and I don’t know if people really do ethical reflection as such anymore (participant 10). The fundamental structural issue, I would say, is the mismatch between the normative requirements and the real risks posed by the research, i.e., we have many, many requirements to meet; we have very long forms to fill out but the research projects we evaluate often pose few risks (participant 8). People [in vulnerable situations] were previously unable to participate because of overly strict research ethics rules that were to protect them, but in the end [these rules] did not protect them. There was a perverse effect, because in the end there was very little research done with these people and that’s why we have very few results, very little evidence [to support practices with these populations] so it didn’t improve the quality of services. (…) We all understand that we have to be careful with that, but when the research is not too risky, we say to ourselves that it would be good because for once a researcher who is interested in that population, because it is not a very popular population, it would be interesting to have results, but often we are blocked by the norms, and then we can’t accept [the project] (participant 2).

Moreover, as one participant noted, accessing ethics training can be a challenge.

There is no course on research ethics. […] Then, I find that it’s boring because you go through university and you come to do your research and you know how to do quantitative and qualitative research, but all the research ethics, where do you get this? I don’t really know (participant 13).

Yet, such training could provide relevant tools to resolve, to some extent, the ethical issues that commonly arise in research. That said, and as noted by many participants, many ethical issues in research are related to social injustices over which research actors have little influence.

Social Injustices

For many participants, notably researchers, the issues that concern social injustices are those related to power asymmetries, stigma, or issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion, i.e., social injustices related to people’s identities (Blais & Drolet, 2022 ). Participants reported experiencing or witnessing discrimination from peers, administration, or lab managers. Such oppression is sometimes cross-sectional and related to a person’s age, cultural background, gender or social status.

I have my African colleague who was quite successful when he arrived but had a backlash from colleagues in the department. I think it’s unconscious, nobody is overtly racist. But I have a young person right now who is the same, who has the same success, who got exactly the same early career award and I don’t see the same backlash. He’s just as happy with what he’s doing. It’s normal, they’re young and they have a lot of success starting out. So, I think there is discrimination. Is it because he is African? Is it because he is black? I think it’s on a subconscious level (participant 16).

Social injustices were experienced or reported by many participants, and included issues related to difficulties in obtaining grants or disseminating research results in one’s native language (i.e., even when there is official bilingualism) or being considered credible and fundable in research when one researcher is a woman.

If you do international research, there are things you can’t talk about (…). It is really a barrier to research to not be able to (…) address this question [i.e. the question of inequalities between men and women]. Women’s inequality is going to be addressed [but not within the country where the research takes place as if this inequality exists elsewhere but not here]. There are a lot of women working on inequality issues, doing work and it’s funny because I was talking to a young woman who works at Cairo University and she said to me: “Listen, I saw what you had written, you’re right. I’m willing to work on this but guarantee me a position at your university with a ticket to go”. So yes, there are still many barriers [for women in research] (participant 16).

Because of the varied contextual characteristics that intervene in their occurrence, these social injustices are also related to distributive injustices, as discussed by many participants.

Distributive Injustices

Although there are several views of distributive justice, a classical definition such as that of Aristotle ( 2012 ), describes distributive justice as consisting in distributing honours, wealth, and other social resources or benefits among the members of a community in proportion to their alleged merit. Justice, then, is about determining an equitable distribution of common goods. Contemporary theories of distributive justice are numerous and varied. Indeed, many authors (e.g., Fraser 2011 ; Mills, 2017 ; Sen, 2011 ; Young, 2011 ) have, since Rawls ( 1971 ), proposed different visions of how social burdens and benefits should be shared within a community to ensure equal respect, fairness, and distribution. In our study, what emerges from participants’ narratives is a definite concern for this type of justice. Women researchers, francophone researchers, early career researchers or researchers belonging to racialized groups all discussed inequities in the distribution of research grants and awards, and the extra work they need to do to somehow prove their worth. These inequities are related to how granting agencies determine which projects will be funded.

These situations make me work 2–3 times harder to prove myself and to show people in power that I have a place as a woman in research (participant 12). Number one: it’s conservative thinking. The older ones control what comes in. So, the younger people have to adapt or they don’t get funded (participant 14).

Whether it is discrimination against stigmatized or marginalized populations or interest in certain hot topics, granting agencies judge research projects according to criteria that are sometimes questionable, according to those participants. Faced with difficulties in obtaining funding for their projects, several strategies – some of which are unethical – are used by researchers in order to cope with these situations.

Sometimes there are subjects that everyone goes to, such as nanotechnology (…), artificial intelligence or (…) the therapeutic use of cannabis, which are very fashionable, and this is sometimes to the detriment of other research that is just as relevant, but which is (…), less sexy, less in the spirit of the time. (…) Sometimes this can lead to inequities in the funding of certain research sectors (participant 9). When we use our funds, we get them given to us, we pretty much say what we think we’re going to do with them, but things change… So, when these things change, sometimes it’s an ethical decision, but by force of circumstances I’m obliged to change the project a little bit (…). Is it ethical to make these changes or should I just let the money go because I couldn’t use it the way I said I would? (participant 3).

Moreover, these distributional injustices are not only linked to social injustices, but also epistemic injustices. Indeed, the way in which research honours and grants are distributed within the academic community depends on the epistemic authority of the researchers, which seems to vary notably according to their language of use, their age or their gender, but also to the research design used (inductive versus deductive), their decision to use (or not use) animals in research, or to conduct activist research.

Epistemic injustices

The philosopher Fricker ( 2007 ) conceptualized the notions of epistemic justice and injustice. Epistemic injustice refers to a form of social inequality that manifests itself in the access, recognition, and production of knowledge as well as the various forms of ignorance that arise (Godrie & Dos Santos, 2017 ). Addressing epistemic injustice necessitates acknowledging the iniquitous wrongs suffered by certain groups of socially stigmatized individuals who have been excluded from knowledge, thus limiting their abilities to interpret, understand, or be heard and account for their experiences. In this study, epistemic injustices were experienced or reported by some participants, notably those related to difficulties in obtaining grants or disseminating research results in one’s native language (i.e., even when there is official bilingualism) or being considered credible and fundable in research when a researcher is a woman or an early career researcher.

I have never sent a grant application to the federal government in English. I have always done it in French, even though I know that when you receive the review, you can see that reviewers didn’t understand anything because they are English-speaking. I didn’t want to get in the boat. It’s not my job to translate, because let’s be honest, I’m not as good in English as I am in French. So, I do them in my first language, which is the language I’m most used to. Then, technically at the administrative level, they are supposed to be able to do it, but they are not good in French. (…) Then, it’s a very big Canadian ethical issue, because basically there are technically two official languages, but Canada is not a bilingual country, it’s a country with two languages, either one or the other. (…) So I was not funded (participant 14).

Researchers who use inductive (or qualitative) methods observed that their projects are sometimes less well reviewed or understood, while research that adopts a hypothetical-deductive (or quantitative) or mixed methods design is better perceived, considered more credible and therefore more easily funded. Of course, regardless of whether a research project adopts an inductive, deductive or mixed-methods scientific design, or whether it deals with qualitative or quantitative data, it must respect a set of scientific criteria. A research project should achieve its objectives by using proven methods that, in the case of inductive research, are credible, reliable, and transferable or, in the case of deductive research, generalizable, objective, representative, and valid (Drolet & Ruest, accepted ). Participants discussing these issues noted that researchers who adopt a qualitative design or those who question the relevance of animal experimentation or are not militant have sometimes been unfairly devalued in their epistemic authority.

There is a mini war between quantitative versus qualitative methods, which I think is silly because science is a method. If you apply the method well, it doesn’t matter what the field is, it’s done well and it’s perfect ” (participant 14). There is also the issue of the place of animals in our lives, because for me, ethics is human ethics, but also animal ethics. Then, there is a great evolution in society on the role of the animal… with the new law that came out in Quebec on the fact that animals are sensitive beings. Then, with the rise of the vegan movement, [we must ask ourselves]: “Do animals still have a place in research?” That’s a big question and it also means that there are practices that need to evolve, but sometimes there’s a disconnection between what’s expected by research ethics boards versus what’s expected in the field (participant 15). In research today, we have more and more research that is militant from an ideological point of view. And so, we have researchers, because they defend values that seem important to them, we’ll talk for example about the fight for equality and social justice. They have pressure to defend a form of moral truth and have the impression that everyone thinks like them or should do so, because they are defending a moral truth. This is something that we see more and more, namely the lack of distance between ideology and science (participant 8).

The combination or intersectionality of these inequities, which seems to be characterized by a lack of ethical support and guidance, is experienced in the highly competitive and individualistic context of research; it provides therefore the perfect recipe for researchers to experience ethical distress.

Ethical distress

The concept of “ethical distress” refers to situations in which people know what they should do to act ethically, but encounter barriers, generally of an organizational or systemic nature, limiting their power to act according to their moral or ethical values (Drolet & Ruest, 2021 ; Jameton, 1984 ; Swisher et al., 2005 ). People then run the risk of finding themselves in a situation where they do not act as their ethical conscience dictates, which in the long term has the potential for exhaustion and distress. The examples reported by participants in this study point to the fact that researchers in particular may be experiencing significant ethical distress. This distress takes place in a context of extreme competition, constant injunctions to perform, and where administrative demands are increasingly numerous and complex to complete, while paradoxically, they lack the time to accomplish all their tasks and responsibilities. Added to these demands are a lack of resources (human, ethical, and financial), a lack of support and recognition, and interpersonal conflicts.

We are in an environment, an elite one, you are part of it, you know what it is: “publish or perish” is the motto. Grants, there is a high level of performance required, to do a lot, to publish, to supervise students, to supervise them well, so yes, it is clear that we are in an environment that is conducive to distress. (…). Overwork, definitely, can lead to distress and eventually to exhaustion. When you know that you should take the time to read the projects before sharing them, but you don’t have the time to do that because you have eight that came in the same day, and then you have others waiting… Then someone rings a bell and says: “ah but there, the protocol is a bit incomplete”. Oh yes, look at that, you’re right. You make up for it, but at the same time it’s a bit because we’re in a hurry, we don’t necessarily have the resources or are able to take the time to do things well from the start, we have to make up for it later. So yes, it can cause distress (participant 9). My organization wanted me to apply in English, and I said no, and everyone in the administration wanted me to apply in English, and I always said no. Some people said: “Listen, I give you the choice”, then some people said: “Listen, I agree with you, but if you’re not [submitting] in English, you won’t be funded”. Then the fact that I am young too, because very often they will look at the CV, they will not look at the project: “ah, his CV is not impressive, we will not finance him”. This is complete nonsense. The person is capable of doing the project, the project is fabulous: we fund the project. So, that happened, organizational barriers: that happened a lot. I was not eligible for Quebec research funds (…). I had big organizational barriers unfortunately (participant 14). At the time of my promotion, some colleagues were not happy with the type of research I was conducting. I learned – you learn this over time when you become friends with people after you enter the university – that someone was against me. He had another candidate in mind, and he was angry about the selection. I was under pressure for the first three years until my contract was renewed. I almost quit at one point, but another colleague told me, “No, stay, nothing will happen”. Nothing happened, but these issues kept me awake at night (participant 16).

This difficult context for many researchers affects not only the conduct of their own research, but also their participation in research. We faced this problem in our study, despite the use of multiple recruitment methods, including more than 200 emails – of which 191 were individual solicitations – sent to potential participants by the two research assistants. REB members and organizations overseeing or supporting research (n = 17) were also approached to see if some of their employees would consider participating. While it was relatively easy to recruit REB members and research ethics experts, our team received a high number of non-responses to emails (n = 175) and some refusals (n = 5), especially by researchers. The reasons given by those who replied were threefold: (a) fear of being easily identified should they take part in the research, (b) being overloaded and lacking time, and (c) the intrusive aspect of certain questions (i.e., “Have you experienced a burnout episode? If so, have you been followed up medically or psychologically?”). In light of these difficulties and concerns, some questions in the socio-demographic questionnaire were removed or modified. Talking about burnout in research remains a taboo for many researchers, which paradoxically can only contribute to the unresolved problem of unhealthy research environments.

Returning to the research question and objective

The question that prompted this research was: What are the ethical issues in research? The purpose of the study was to describe these issues from the perspective of researchers (from different disciplines), research ethics board (REB) members, and research ethics experts. The previous section provided a detailed portrait of the ethical issues experienced by different research stakeholders: these issues are numerous, diverse and were recounted by a range of stakeholders.

The results of the study are generally consistent with the literature. For example, as in our study, the literature discusses the lack of research integrity on the part of some researchers (Al-Hidabi et al., 2018 ; Swazey et al., 1993 ), the numerous conflicts of interest experienced in research (Williams-Jones et al., 2013 ), the issues of recruiting and obtaining the free and informed consent of research participants (Provencher et al., 2014 ; Keogh & Daly, 2009 ), the sometimes difficult relations between researchers and REBs (Drolet & Girard, 2020 ), the epistemological issues experienced in research (Drolet & Ruest, accepted; Sieber 2004 ), as well as the harmful academic context in which researchers evolve, insofar as this is linked to a culture of performance, an overload of work in a context of accountability (Berg & Seeber, 2016 ; FQPPU; 2019 ) that is conducive to ethical distress and even burnout.

If the results of the study are generally in line with those of previous publications on the subject, our findings also bring new elements to the discussion while complementing those already documented. In particular, our results highlight the role of systemic injustices – be they social, distributive or epistemic – within the environments in which research is carried out, at least in Canada. To summarize, the results of our study point to the fact that the relationships between researchers and research participants are likely still to raise worrying ethical issues, despite widely accepted research ethics norms and institutionalized review processes. Further, the context in which research is carried out is not only conducive to breaches of ethical norms and instances of misbehaviour or misconduct, but also likely to be significantly detrimental to the health and well-being of researchers, as well as research assistants. Another element that our research also highlighted is the instrumentalization and even exploitation of students and research assistants, which is another important and worrying social injustice given the inevitable power imbalances between students and researchers.

Moreover, in a context in which ethical issues are often discussed from a micro perspective, our study helps shed light on both the micro- and macro-level ethical dimensions of research (Bronfenbrenner, 1979 ; Glaser 1994 ). However, given that ethical issues in research are not only diverse, but also and above all complex, a broader perspective that encompasses the interplay between the micro and macro dimensions can enable a better understanding of these issues and thereby support the identification of the multiple factors that may be at their origin. Triangulating the perspectives of researchers with those of REB members and research ethics experts enabled us to bring these elements to light, and thus to step back from and critique the way that research is currently conducted. To this end, attention to socio-political elements such as the performance culture in academia or how research funds are distributed, and according to what explicit and implicit criteria, can contribute to identifying the sources of the ethical issues described above.

Contemporary culture characterized by the social acceleration

The German sociologist and philosopher Rosa (2010) argues that late modernity – that is, the period between the 1980s and today – is characterized by a phenomenon of social acceleration that causes various forms of alienation in our relationship to time, space, actions, things, others and ourselves. Rosa distinguishes three types of acceleration: technical acceleration , the acceleration of social changes and the acceleration of the rhythm of life . According to Rosa, social acceleration is the main problem of late modernity, in that the invisible social norm of doing more and faster to supposedly save time operates unchallenged at all levels of individual and collective life, as well as organizational and social life. Although we all, researchers and non-researchers alike, perceive this unspoken pressure to be ever more productive, the process of social acceleration as a new invisible social norm is our blind spot, a kind of tyrant over which we have little control. This conceptualization of the contemporary culture can help us to understand the context in which research is conducted (like other professional practices). To this end, Berg & Seeber ( 2016 ) invite faculty researchers to slow down in order to better reflect and, in the process, take care of their health and their relationships with their colleagues and students. Many women professors encourage their fellow researchers, especially young women researchers, to learn to “say No” in order to protect their mental and physical health and to remain in their academic careers (Allaire & Descheneux, 2022 ). These authors also remind us of the relevance of Kahneman’s ( 2012 ) work which demonstrates that it takes time to think analytically, thoroughly, and logically. Conversely, thinking quickly exposes humans to cognitive and implicit biases that then lead to errors in thinking (e.g., in the analysis of one’s own research data or in the evaluation of grant applications or student curriculum vitae). The phenomenon of social acceleration, which pushes the researcher to think faster and faster, is likely to lead to unethical bad science that can potentially harm humankind. In sum, Rosa’s invitation to contemporary critical theorists to seriously consider the problem of social acceleration is particularly insightful to better understand the ethical issues of research. It provides a lens through which to view the toxic context in which research is conducted today, and one that was shared by the participants in our study.

Clark & Sousa ( 2022 ) note, it is important that other criteria than the volume of researchers’ contributions be valued in research, notably quality. Ultimately, it is the value of the knowledge produced and its influence on the concrete lives of humans and other living beings that matters, not the quantity of publications. An interesting articulation of this view in research governance is seen in a change in practice by Australia’s national health research funder: they now restrict researchers to listing on their curriculum vitae only the top ten publications from the past ten years (rather than all of their publications), in order to evaluate the quality of contributions rather than their quantity. To create environments conducive to the development of quality research, it is important to challenge the phenomenon of social acceleration, which insidiously imposes a quantitative normativity that is both alienating and detrimental to the quality and ethical conduct of research. Based on our experience, we observe that the social norm of acceleration actively disfavours the conduct of empirical research on ethics in research. The fact is that researchers are so busy that it is almost impossible for them to find time to participate in such studies. Further, operating in highly competitive environments, while trying to respect the values and ethical principles of research, creates ethical paradoxes for members of the research community. According to Malherbe ( 1999 ), an ethical paradox is a situation where an individual is confronted by contradictory injunctions (i.e., do more, faster, and better). And eventually, ethical paradoxes lead individuals to situations of distress and burnout, or even to ethical failures (i.e., misbehaviour or misconduct) in the face of the impossibility of responding to contradictory injunctions.

Strengths and Limitations of the study

The triangulation of perceptions and experiences of different actors involved in research is a strength of our study. While there are many studies on the experiences of researchers, rarely are members of REBs and experts in research ethics given the space to discuss their views of what are ethical issues. Giving each of these stakeholders a voice and comparing their different points of view helped shed a different and complementary light on the ethical issues that occur in research. That said, it would have been helpful to also give more space to issues experienced by students or research assistants, as the relationships between researchers and research assistants are at times very worrying, as noted by a participant, and much work still needs to be done to eliminate the exploitative situations that seem to prevail in certain research settings. In addition, no Indigenous or gender diverse researchers participated in the study. Given the ethical issues and systemic injustices that many people from these groups face in Canada (Drolet & Goulet, 2018 ; Nicole & Drolet, in press ), research that gives voice to these researchers would be relevant and contribute to knowledge development, and hopefully also to change in research culture.

Further, although most of the ethical issues discussed in this article may be transferable to the realities experienced by researchers in other countries, the epistemic injustice reported by Francophone researchers who persist in doing research in French in Canada – which is an officially bilingual country but in practice is predominantly English – is likely specific to the Canadian reality. In addition, and as mentioned above, recruitment proved exceedingly difficult, particularly amongst researchers. Despite this difficulty, we obtained data saturation for all but two themes – i.e., exploitation of students and ethical issues of research that uses animals. It follows that further empirical research is needed to improve our understanding of these specific issues, as they may diverge to some extent from those documented here and will likely vary across countries and academic research contexts.

Conclusions

This study, which gave voice to researchers, REB members, and ethics experts, reveals that the ethical issues in research are related to several problematic elements as power imbalances and authority relations. Researchers and research assistants are subject to external pressures that give rise to integrity issues, among others ethical issues. Moreover, the current context of social acceleration influences the definition of the performance indicators valued in academic institutions and has led their members to face several ethical issues, including social, distributive, and epistemic injustices, at different steps of the research process. In this study, ten categories of ethical issues were identified, described and illustrated: (1) research integrity, (2) conflicts of interest, (3) respect for research participants, (4) lack of supervision and power imbalances, (5) individualism and performance, (6) inadequate ethical guidance, (7) social injustices, (8) distributive injustices, (9) epistemic injustices, and (10) ethical distress. The triangulation of the perspectives of different members (i.e., researchers from different disciplines, REB members, research ethics experts, and one research assistant) involved in the research process made it possible to lift the veil on some of these ethical issues. Further, it enabled the identification of additional ethical issues, especially systemic injustices experienced in research. To our knowledge, this is the first time that these injustices (social, distributive, and epistemic injustices) have been clearly identified.

Finally, this study brought to the fore several problematic elements that are important to address if the research community is to develop and implement the solutions needed to resolve the diverse and transversal ethical issues that arise in research institutions. A good starting point is the rejection of the corollary norms of “publish or perish” and “do more, faster, and better” and their replacement with “publish quality instead of quantity”, which necessarily entails “do less, slower, and better”. It is also important to pay more attention to the systemic injustices within which researchers work, because these have the potential to significantly harm the academic careers of many researchers, including women researchers, early career researchers, and those belonging to racialized groups as well as the health, well-being, and respect of students and research participants.

Acknowledgements

The team warmly thanks the participants who took part in the research and who made this study possible. Marie-Josée Drolet thanks the five research assistants who participated in the data collection and analysis: Julie-Claude Leblanc, Élie Beauchemin, Pénéloppe Bernier, Louis-Pierre Côté, and Eugénie Rose-Derouin, all students at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR), two of whom were active in the writing of this article. MJ Drolet and Bryn Williams-Jones also acknowledge the financial contribution of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), which supported this research through a grant. We would also like to thank the reviewers of this article who helped us improve it, especially by clarifying and refining our ideas.

Competing Interests and Funding

As noted in the Acknowledgements, this research was supported financially by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

• Al-Hidabi, Abdulmalek, M. D., & The, P. L. (2018). Multiple Publications: The Main Reason for the Retraction of Papers in Computer Science. In K. Arai, S. Kapoor, & R. Bhatia (eds), Future of Information and Communication Conference (FICC): Advances in Information and Communication, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing (AISC), Springer, vol. 886, pp. 511–526
• Allaire, S., & Deschenaux, F. (2022). Récits de professeurs d’université à mi-carrière. Si c’était à refaire… . Presses de l’Université du Québec
• Aristotle . Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press; 2012. [ Google Scholar ]
• Bahn S. Keeping Academic Field Researchers Safe: Ethical Safeguards. Journal of Academic Ethics. 2012; 10 :83–91. doi: 10.1007/s10805-012-9159-2. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Balk DE. Bereavement Research Using Control Groups: Ethical Obligations and Questions. Death Studies. 1995; 19 :123–138. doi: 10.1080/07481189508252720. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Beauchemin, É., Côté, L. P., Drolet, M. J., & Williams-Jones, B. (2021). Conceptualizing Ethical Issues in the Conduct of Research: Results from a Critical and Systematic Literature Review. Journal of Academic Ethics , Early Online. 10.1007/s10805-021-09411-7
• Berg, M., & Seeber, B. K. (2016). The Slow Professor . University of Toronto Press
• Birchley G, Huxtable R, Murtagh M, Meulen RT, Flach P, Gooberman-Hill R. Smart homes, private homes? An empirical study of technology researchers’ perceptions of ethical issues in developing smart-home health technologies. BMC Medical Ethics. 2017; 18 (23):1–13. doi: 10.1186/s12910-017-0183-z. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Blais, J., & Drolet, M. J. (2022). Les injustices sociales vécues en camp de réfugiés: les comprendre pour mieux intervenir auprès de personnes ayant séjourné dans un camp de réfugiés. Recueil annuel belge d’ergothérapie , 14, 37–48
• Bogdan, R. C., & Biklen, S. K. (2006). Qualitative research in education: An introduction to theory and methods . Allyn & Bacon
• Bouffard C. Le développement des pratiques de la génétique médicale et la construction des normes bioéthiques. Anthropologie et Sociétés. 2000; 24 (2):73–90. doi: 10.7202/015650ar. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The Ecology of Human development. Experiments by nature and design . Harvard University Press
• Bruhn JG, Zajac G, Al-Kazemi AA, Prescott LD. Moral positions and academic conduct: Parameters of tolerance for ethics failure. Journal of Higher Education. 2002; 73 (4):461–493. doi: 10.1353/jhe.2002.0033. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Clark, A., & Sousa (2022). It’s time to end Canada’s obsession with research quantity. University Affairs/Affaires universitaires , February 14th. https://www.universityaffairs.ca/career-advice/effective-successfull-happy-academic/its-time-to-end-canadas-obsession-with-research-quantity/?utm_source=University+Affairs+e-newsletter&utm_campaign=276a847f 70-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_02_16&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_314bc2ee29-276a847f70-425259989
• Colnerud G. Ethical dilemmas in research in relation to ethical review: An empirical study. Research Ethics. 2015; 10 (4):238–253. doi: 10.1177/1747016114552339. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Davison J. Dilemmas in Research: Issues of Vulnerability and Disempowerment for the Social Workers/Researcher. Journal of Social Work Practice. 2004; 18 (3):379–393. doi: 10.1080/0265053042000314447. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• DePoy E, Gitlin LN. Introduction to Research. St. Louis: Elsevier Mosby; 2010. [ Google Scholar ]
• Drolet, M. J., & Goulet, M. (2018). Travailler avec des patients autochtones du Canada ? Perceptions d’ergothérapeutes du Québec des enjeux éthiques de cette pratique. Recueil annuel belge francophone d’ergothérapie , 10 , 25–56
• Drolet MJ, Girard K. Les enjeux éthiques de la recherche en ergothérapie: un portrait préoccupant. Revue canadienne de bioéthique. 2020; 3 (3):21–40. doi: 10.7202/1073779ar. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Drolet MJ, Girard K, Gaudet R. Les enjeux éthiques de l’enseignement en ergothérapie: des injustices au sein des départements universitaires. Revue canadienne de bioéthique. 2020; 3 (1):22–36. [ Google Scholar ]
• Drolet MJ, Maclure J. Les enjeux éthiques de la pratique de l’ergothérapie: perceptions d’ergothérapeutes. Revue Approches inductives. 2016; 3 (2):166–196. doi: 10.7202/1037918ar. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Drolet MJ, Pinard C, Gaudet R. Les enjeux éthiques de la pratique privée: des ergothérapeutes du Québec lancent un cri d’alarme. Ethica – Revue interdisciplinaire de recherche en éthique. 2017; 21 (2):173–209. [ Google Scholar ]
• Drolet MJ, Ruest M. De l’éthique à l’ergothérapie: un cadre théorique et une méthode pour soutenir la pratique professionnelle. Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec; 2021. [ Google Scholar ]
• Drolet, M. J., & Ruest, M. (accepted). Quels sont les enjeux éthiques soulevés par la recherche scientifique? In M. Lalancette & J. Luckerhoff (dir). Initiation au travail intellectuel et à la recherche . Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 18 p
• Drolet MJ, Sauvageau A, Baril N, Gaudet R. Les enjeux éthiques de la formation clinique en ergothérapie. Revue Approches inductives. 2019; 6 (1):148–179. doi: 10.7202/1060048ar. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Fédération québécoise des professeures et des professeurs d’université (FQPPU) Enquête nationale sur la surcharge administrative du corps professoral universitaire québécois. Principaux résultats et pistes d’action. Montréal: FQPPU; 2019. [ Google Scholar ]
• Fortin MH. Fondements et étapes du processus de recherche. Méthodes quantitatives et qualitatives. Montréal, QC: Chenelière éducation; 2010. [ Google Scholar ]
• Fraser DM. Ethical dilemmas and practical problems for the practitioner researcher. Educational Action Research. 1997; 5 (1):161–171. doi: 10.1080/09650799700200014. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Fraser, N. (2011). Qu’est-ce que la justice sociale? Reconnaissance et redistribution . La Découverte
• Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing . Oxford University Press
• Giorgi A, et al. De la méthode phénoménologique utilisée comme mode de recherche qualitative en sciences humaines: théories, pratique et évaluation. In: Poupart J, Groulx LH, Deslauriers JP, et al., editors. La recherche qualitative: enjeux épistémologiques et méthodologiques. Boucherville, QC: Gaëtan Morin; 1997. pp. 341–364. [ Google Scholar ]
• Giorgini V, Mecca JT, Gibson C, Medeiros K, Mumford MD, Connelly S, Devenport LD. Researcher Perceptions of Ethical Guidelines and Codes of Conduct. Accountability in Research. 2016; 22 (3):123–138. doi: 10.1080/08989621.2014.955607. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Glaser, J. W. (1994). Three realms of ethics: Individual, institutional, societal. Theoretical model and case studies . Kansas Cuty, Sheed & Ward
• Godrie B, Dos Santos M. Présentation: inégalités sociales, production des savoirs et de l’ignorance. Sociologie et sociétés. 2017; 49 (1):7. doi: 10.7202/1042804ar. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Hammell KW, Carpenter C, Dyck I. Using Qualitative Research: A Practical Introduction for Occupational and Physical Therapists. Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone; 2000. [ Google Scholar ]
• Henderson M, Johnson NF, Auld G. Silences of ethical practice: dilemmas for researchers using social media. Educational Research and Evaluation. 2013; 19 (6):546–560. doi: 10.1080/13803611.2013.805656. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Husserl E. The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press; 1970. [ Google Scholar ]
• Husserl E. The train of thoughts in the lectures. In: Polifroni EC, Welch M, editors. Perspectives on Philosophy of Science in Nursing. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott; 1999. [ Google Scholar ]
• Hunt SD, Chonko LB, Wilcox JB. Ethical problems of marketing researchers. Journal of Marketing Research. 1984; 21 :309–324. doi: 10.1177/002224378402100308. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Hunt MR, Carnevale FA. Moral experience: A framework for bioethics research. Journal of Medical Ethics. 2011; 37 (11):658–662. doi: 10.1136/jme.2010.039008. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Jameton, A. (1984). Nursing practice: The ethical issues . Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall
• Jarvis K. Dilemmas in International Research and the Value of Practical Wisdom. Developing World Bioethics. 2017; 17 (1):50–58. doi: 10.1111/dewb.12121. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kahneman D. Système 1, système 2: les deux vitesses de la pensée. Paris: Flammarion; 2012. [ Google Scholar ]
• Keogh B, Daly L. The ethics of conducting research with mental health service users. British Journal of Nursing. 2009; 18 (5):277–281. doi: 10.12968/bjon.2009.18.5.40539. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Lierville AL, Grou C, Pelletier JF. Enjeux éthiques potentiels liés aux partenariats patients en psychiatrie: État de situation à l’Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal. Santé mentale au Québec. 2015; 40 (1):119–134. doi: 10.7202/1032386ar. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Lynöe N, Sandlund M, Jacobsson L. Research ethics committees: A comparative study of assessment of ethical dilemmas. Scandinavian Journal of Public Health. 1999; 27 (2):152–159. doi: 10.1177/14034948990270020401. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Malherbe JF. Compromis, dilemmes et paradoxes en éthique clinique. Anjou: Éditions Fides; 1999. [ Google Scholar ]
• McGinn R. Discernment and denial: Nanotechnology researchers’ recognition of ethical responsibilities related to their work. NanoEthics. 2013; 7 :93–105. doi: 10.1007/s11569-013-0174-6. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Mills, C. W. (2017). Black Rights / White rongs. The Critique of Racial Liberalism . Oxford University Press
• Miyazaki AD, Taylor KA. Researcher interaction biases and business ethics research: Respondent reactions to researcher characteristics. Journal of Business Ethics. 2008; 81 (4):779–795. doi: 10.1007/s10551-007-9547-5. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Mondain N, Bologo E. L’intentionnalité du chercheur dans ses pratiques de production des connaissances: les enjeux soulevés par la construction des données en démographie et santé en Afrique. Cahiers de recherche sociologique. 2009; 48 :175–204. doi: 10.7202/039772ar. [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Nicole, M., & Drolet, M. J. (in press). Fitting transphobia and cisgenderism in occupational therapy, Occupational Therapy Now
• Pope KS, Vetter VA. Ethical dilemmas encountered by members of the American Psychological Association: A national survey. The American Psychologist. 1992; 47 (3):397–411. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.47.3.397. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Provencher V, Mortenson WB, Tanguay-Garneau L, Bélanger K, Dagenais M. Challenges and strategies pertaining to recruitment and retention of frail elderly in research studies: A systematic review. Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics. 2014; 59 (1):18–24. doi: 10.1016/j.archger.2014.03.006. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice . Harvard University Press
• Resnik DB, Elliott KC. The Ethical Challenges of Socially Responsible Science. Accountability in Research. 2016; 23 (1):31–46. doi: 10.1080/08989621.2014.1002608. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Rosa, H. (2010). Accélération et aliénation. Vers une théorie critique de la modernité tardive . Paris, Découverte
• Sen, A. K. (2011). The Idea of Justice . The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
• Sen, A. K. (1995). Inegality Reexaminated . Oxford University Press
• Sieber JE. Empirical Research on Research Ethics. Ethics & Behavior. 2004; 14 (4):397–412. doi: 10.1207/s15327019eb1404_9. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Sigmon ST. Ethical practices and beliefs of psychopathology researchers. Ethics & Behavior. 1995; 5 (4):295–309. doi: 10.1207/s15327019eb0504_1. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Swazey JP, Anderson MS, Lewis KS. Ethical Problems in Academic Research. American Scientist. 1993; 81 (6):542–553. [ Google Scholar ]
• Swisher LL, Arsalanian LE, Davis CM. The realm-individual-process-situation (RIPS) model of ethical decision-making. HPA Resource. 2005; 5 (3):3–8. [ Google Scholar ]
• Tri-Council Policy Statement (TCPS2) (2018). Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans . Government of Canada, Secretariat on Responsible Conduct of Research. https://ethics.gc.ca/eng/documents/tcps2-2018-en-interactive-final.pdf
• Thomas SP, Pollio HR. Listening to Patients: A Phenomenological Approach to Nursing Research and Practice. New York: Springer Publishing Company; 2002. [ Google Scholar ]
• Wiegand DL, Funk M. Consequences of clinical situations that cause critical care nurses to experience moral distress. Nursing Ethics. 2012; 19 (4):479–487. doi: 10.1177/0969733011429342. [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Williams-Jones B, Potvin MJ, Mathieu G, Smith E. Barriers to research on research ethics review and conflicts of interest. IRB: Ethics & Human Research. 2013; 35 (5):14–20. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Young, I. M. (2011). Justice and the Politics of difference . Princeton University Press