Research is a systematic activity aiming to generate new knowledge or understanding in a field of study.

According to Hammersley and Traianou (2012, p. 16), for example, the word “ethics” can have at least two meanings. It can refer to “A field of study, concerned with investigating what is good or right and how we should determine this.

Deontology

The Nuremberg Code is the most important milestone in research ethics because the ethic codes developed in different areas of social sciences were based on the Nuremberg Code. It was designed to outline some basic ethical principles to make sure to have the same applications. 

Research misconduct is defined asfabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results.

Plagiarism is the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit.

The phenomenon of “research ethics” was mostly resulted from the revelations regarding the appalling medical experiments conducted by some Nazi doctors in German concentration camps during the World War II.

The main role of a research ethics committee (REC) is to regulate the ethical conduct of research before it is carried out.

The consequentialist/utilitarian ethics perspective represents a radical rejection of deontological ethics. It argues that “Rather than being guided by general rules specifying duties and rights, actions must be judged, prospectively, in terms of how well designed they are to produce good outcomes, and, retrospectively, according to whether or not they actually produced such outcomes” (Hammersley and Traianou, 2012, p. 22).

• Respect for autonomy (i.e., the obligation to respect decision-making capacities of autonomous people),
• Beneficence (i.e., the obligation to provide benefits and to balance them against risks),• Non-maleficence (i.e., the obligation to avoid causing harm)
• Justice (i.e., the obligation of fairness in the distribution of benefits and risks).

Situation-based ethics stresses that there would always be cases for ethical dilemmas that would be difficult to solve, and therefore there would always be disagreements about what is good/bad or right/ wrong in particular research settings/situations. 

Virtue ethics is the ethical perspective that treats the character of researchers as the primary focus of ethical evaluation.

The relational ethics perspective criticizes deontological, consequential/utilitarian and/or principle-based ethics views for their claim of universal principles and/or obligations; instead, it suggests that researchers “ought to see people as social beings, nested within a complex set of relationships.

Scientific validity (i.e., whether the proposed research is methodologically rigorous),

Economic and Social Research Council’s (2015, p. 3) Framework for Research Ethics lists the following six key ethical principles:

• Research should be designed, reviewed andundertaken to ensure integrity, quality and transparency.

• Research staff and participants must normally be informed fully about the purpose, methods, and intended possible uses of the research, what their participation in the research entails and what risks, if any, are involved...

• The confidentiality of information suppliedby research participants and the anonymity of respondents must be respected.

• The independence of research must be clear,and any conflicts of interest or partiality must be explicit.
• Harm to research participants must beavoided in all instances.
• Research participants must take partvoluntarily, free from any coercion.

Competence is the ability of a participant to understand information relevant to the proposed research.

• Pain, physical injury, and permanentdisability.

• Psychological damage, for instanceemotional distress, erosion of self- confidence, stress-related illness, and so on.

• Material damage of some kind, forexample loss of one’s freedom through imprisonment, dismissal from one’s job, reduction in income or wealth, damage to property, and so on.

• Damage to reputation or status, or torelations with significant others, for example through the disclosure of information that was previously unknown to some relevant audience.

• Damage to a project in which people areengaged, to some group or organization to which they belong, perhaps even to some institution or occupation in which they participate.

Data dissemination (i.e., the extent to which research data can be stored, published, and/ or used by policy makers, etc.).