Obviously, you need to respect copyrights and patents, together with other forms of intellectual property, and always acknowledge contributions to your research. You should always ask for permission before using other people’s tools or methods, unpublished data or results. You should never plagiarise, or copy, other people’s work and try to pass it off as your own. You should also be open to criticism and new ideas. You should always be prepared to share your data and results, along with any new tools that you have developed, when you publish your findings, as this helps to further knowledge and advance science. If you are asked to act as a peer reviewer, you should take the time to do the job effectively and fully.
It is also important to keep full records of your research. You should also review your work carefully and critically to ensure that your results are credible. Take care in carrying out your research to avoid careless mistakes. This also means that you need to disclose any personal or financial interests that may affect your research. For example, you should never recommend as a peer reviewer someone you know, or who you have worked with, and you should try to ensure that no groups are inadvertently excluded from your research. You should aim to avoid bias in any aspect of your research, including design, data analysis, interpretation, and peer review. When working with others, you should always keep to any agreements, and act sincerely. It is better to undersell than over-exaggerate your findings. You should not make up any data, including extrapolating unreasonably from some of your results, or do anything which could be construed as trying to mislead anyone. This means that you need to report your research honestly, and that this applies to your methods (what you did), your data, your results, and whether you have previously published any of it. Some ethical codes may have the force of law behind them, while others may simply be advisable. Government agencies who fund or commission research often publish codes of conduct for researchers, or codes of ethics.įor example, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) both publish ethical codes.
(2015) What is Ethics in Research and Why is it Important? They support important social and moral values, such as the principle of doing no harm to others.For people to support and fund research, they have to be confident in it. They ensure that the public can trust research.Many researchers are supported by public money, and regulations on conflicts of interest, misconduct, and research involving humans or animals are necessary to ensure that money is spent appropriately. They mean that researchers can be held accountable for their actions.This is essential because scientific research depends on collaboration between researchers and groups. They support the values required for collaborative work, such as mutual respect and fairness.They promote the aims of research, such as expanding knowledge.Research ethics are important for a number of reasons.
These include the importance of publishing findings in a transparent way, not plagiarising others’ work, and not falsifying work. While these issues are indeed a key part of research ethics, there are also wider issues about standards of conduct. When most people think of research ethics, they think about issues that arise when research involves human or animal subjects. This page explains more about research ethics, and how you can ensure that your research is compliant. Research ethics are the set of ethics that govern how scientific and other research is performed at research institutions such as universities, and how it is disseminated. While there is broad agreement on some ethical values (for example, that murder is bad), there is also wide variation on how exactly these values should be interpreted in practice. Ethics are broadly the set of rules, written and unwritten, that govern our expectations of our own and others’ behaviour.Įffectively, they set out how we expect others to behave, and why.