Ethics and scientific conduct

Ethics and scientific conduct are a broad subject that is detailed in innumerable published works, many of which are larger than this book. Consequently, this chapter constitutes at best a brief overview of the aspects of ethics applicable to biomedical research. First, the reasons for the increasing interest in ensuring good scientific conduct will be discussed. This will be followed by an outline of the three ethical frameworks frequently used for the assessment of research activities, a discussion of the internal ethics of science and research endeavors, and finally a look at some specific forms of scientific misconduct, including wrong observations and analysis, plagiarism, the fabrication of data and results, false or gift authorship, and duplicate publication. The "external" ethics of science-the basic principles of research ethics as they apply to biomedical research on human subjects and experimental animals-are discussed in Chapter 3.