International Research Ethics

Abstract

Research ethics came into its own as an ongoing academic and regulatory concern in the aftermath of the Nuremberg trials. Knowledge of the Nazi experiments led to the first international guidelines stipulating basic ethics standards for research involving human participants. Subsequent scandals – including but not limited to the Tuskegee syphilis study – led to further and improved ethics guidelines such as the World Medical Association's Declaration of Helsinki as well as such national regulatory documents as the landmark Belmont Report in the United States. Academic and policy analyses in research ethics are marked by reasonably clear dividing lines between clinical and nonclinical investigations, as well as between research conducted in developed countries and research in developing countries. A few issues cut across these dividing lines, such as concerns about academic misconduct like the falsification of data, arguments about legitimate claims to authorship of a scientific publication, and plagiarism. Most of the latter concerns have been successfully addressed in international guidance documents.