Mining the literature for ethics statements: a step towards standardizing research ethics

Abstract

Ethical aspects of research are steadily receiving more attention, from descriptions of research that is proposed to be done to the documentation of ongoing research to reports about research already performed. One of the ways in which this trend manifests itself is the increasingly common addition of ethics statements to publications in fields like biomedicine, psychology or ethnography. Such ethics statements in publications provide the reader with a window into some of the practical yet typically hidden aspects of research ethics. As more and more publications are becoming available in full text and in machine readable formats through repositories like Europe PubMed Central, we propose to mine the literature for ethics statements and to extract information about the various aspects of research ethics that they address. The more standardized these statements are, the better the mined materials can be converted into structured and queryable information that can in turn be used to inform efforts towards higher levels of standardization in research ethics. This paper sketches out the motivation for such mining and outlines some methodological approaches that could be leveraged towards this end.

FAIRifying the dependencies of FAIR Digital Objects within and beyond the research ecosystem

“…In the second part, the poster explores what the benefits and risks would be of making more use of FAIR Digital Objects in research ethics workflows (Hegde et al 2022). The components considered include the circumstances suggesting or even requiring an ethical review, the types of information that need to be exchanged during the process, the types of communications set up to convey said information, the stakeholders involved in any part of the process, the ways in which metadata about the process is stored and shared, and rules that govern any of these aspects and related matters.…”