Research ethics

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Research ethics is a discipline within the study of applied ethics. Its scope ranges from general scientific integrity and misconduct to the treatment of human and animal subjects. The societal responsibilities science and research has are not traditionally included and less well defined.^[1]

The discipline is most developed in medical research. Beyond the issues of falsification, fabrication and plagiarism that arise in every scientific field, research design in human subject research and animal testing are the areas that raise ethical questions themselves most often.

The list of historic cases includes many large scale violations and crimes against humanity such as Nazi human experimentation and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment which lead to international codes of research ethics. No approach has been universally accepted,^[2][3][4] but typically cited codes are the 1947 Nuremberg Code, the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki, and the 1978 Belmont Report.

Today, research ethics committees, such as those of the US, UK and EU, govern and oversee the responsible conduct of research.

Research in other fields such as social sciences, information technology, biotechnology, or engineering may generate ethical concerns.^{[2][3][5][6][7][8]}