Research ethics

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Portuguese. (January 2024) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Portuguese article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 504 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Portuguese Wikipedia article at [[:pt:Ética na ciência]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|pt|Ética na ciência}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Part of a series on
Research
Research design Ethics Proposal Question Writing Argument Referencing
Research strategy Interdisciplinary Multimethodology Qualitative Art-based Quantitative
Philosophical schools Antipositivism Constructivism Critical rationalism Empiricism Fallibilism Positivism Postpositivism Pragmatism Realism Critical realism Subtle realism
Methodology Action research Art methodology Critical theory Grounded theory Hermeneutics Historiography Human subject research Narrative inquiry Phenomenology Pragmatism Scientific method
Methods Analysis Case study Content analysis Descriptive statistics Discourse analysis Ethnography Autoethnography Experiment Field experiment Social experiment Quasi-experiment Field research Historical method Inferential statistics Interviews Mapping Cultural mapping Phenomenography Secondary research Bibliometrics Literature review Meta-analysis Scoping review Systematic review Scientific modelling Simulation Survey
Tools and software Argument technology Geographic information system software Library and information science software Bibliometrics Reference management Science software Qualitative data analysis Simulation Statistics
Philosophy portal
v t e

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 social responsibilities of scientists and researchers are not traditionally included and are 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 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 led 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]}