Research ethics

Research ethics is concerned with the moral issues that arise during or as a result of research activities, as well as the conduct of individual researchers, and the implications for research communities. Ethical issues may arise in the design and implementation of research involving human experimentation or animal experimentation. There may also be consequences for the environment, for society or for future generations that need to be considered. Research ethics can be considered as a subfield of applied ethics.
Historically, scandals such as Nazi human experimentation and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment led to the realisation that clear measures are needed for the ethical governance of research to ensure that people, animals and environments are not unduly harmed by scientific inquiry. While there are no universally accepted approach on management of research ethics across countries, there is a significant body of declarations and treaties and best practices developed. Tipically, research ethics committees (named as institutional review board in the US) have emerged as one governance mechanism to ensure research is conducted responsibly.
Research ethics affect all fields of knowledge that involve human and animal experimentation, from medical research to social sciences. Research ethics is most developed as a concept in medical research, with typically cited codes being the 1947 Nuremberg Code, the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki, and the 1978 Belmont Report. Informed consent is a key concept in research ethics thanks to these codes. Research in other fields such as social sciences, information technology, biotechnology, or engineering may generate different types of ethical concerns to those in medical research.
Research ethics is commonly distinguished from the promotion of academic or research integrity, which includes issues such as scientific misconduct (e.g. fraud, fabrication of data or plagiarism). Because of the close interaction with integrity, increasingly research ethics is included as part of the broader field of responsible conduct of research (RCR in North America) or Responsible Research and Innovation in Europe, and with government agencies such as the United States Office of Research Integrity or the Canadian Interagency Advisory Panel on Responsible Conduct of Research promoting or requiring interdisciplinary training for researchers.
Legislation
National legislation
In countries such as Canada, mandatory research ethics training is required for students, professors and others who work in research, whilst the US has legislated on how institutional review boards operate since the 1974 National Research Act.
Bioethics
Medical ethics
Mitigating harm
Ethics committees
Guidelines for human subject research
The main points of the 1931 Guidelines for Human Experimentation are as follows:[Sass, HM. "Reichsrundschreiben 1931: Pre-Nuremberg German Regulations Concerning New Therapy and Human Experimentation," Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 8 (1983): 99-111.]
Full unambiguous and informed consent from test subjects is required, except in extreme extenuating circumstances.
Risks should be balanced out by potential benefits.
Caution should be taken for subjects under 18 years old.
Extreme caution should be taken if microorganisms are involved.
Poor or socially disadvantaged subjects should not be exploited.
Animal testing should be conducted first, and human experiments are to be avoided if other means of collecting data are still available.
Unethical human experimentation
References
Research
Methodology
Ethics
Scientific method