This pane1 will explore ethical issues, in particular, with regards to metrics and their use.
Ethical issues are important to researchers for several reasons.
First, within the U.S. and Canada, researchers receiving federal grants for their research are required to follow ethical principles regarding informed consent, confidentiality, and minimization of harm. Research grants can be canceled for non-compliance to ethical standards. In rare cases, funding to an entire department can be at risk, as was recently the case for Duke University's Medical School. Another important issue to researchers has to do with ethical codes and their creation. Because this code was not created with software engineering research in mind, it might not conform to how software engineers view ethics.