Participation should be informed and voluntary.
Information must be understandable enough for the decision actually being requested.
Side 124
Research Ethics
The ethical architecture of knowledge production: who bears risk, who receives benefit, how consent and integrity are protected, and what obligations survive after data are collected.
question→participants→risk→evidence→accountability
04lenses
16working concepts
V0content
SS-1.0standard
Human-subject research begins with respect for persons.
Consent, capacity and vulnerability shape what participation can legitimately mean.
Decision-making ability can vary by context.
Safeguards should increase when participants cannot independently evaluate or authorize participation.
Consent should remain revocable where feasible.
Leaving a study should not require accepting penalties that undermine voluntariness.
Data can expose people beyond the study encounter.
Collection, linkage and sharing create risks even when names are removed.
Research must justify burdens in relation to expected value.
Risk is not only physical; social, economic, psychological and informational harms can be consequential.
Map plausible harms before recruitment.
Low-probability harms still matter when severity is high.
Remove avoidable exposure.
A useful design should not impose more risk than the research question requires.
Compare remaining risk with expected benefit and knowledge value.
Benefit to society does not automatically justify concentrated burden on participants.
Update safeguards as evidence changes.
Unexpected harms or efficacy signals can change the ethical balance during a study.
Who is included and excluded matters ethically and scientifically.
Convenience sampling can concentrate burdens while limiting who benefits from the resulting knowledge.
Recruit for reasons tied to the question.
Vulnerability should not become an easy source of accessible participants.
Under-inclusion can also create harm.
Evidence may fail populations systematically excluded from research.
Ask who can use the resulting knowledge.
Research value is partly shaped by whether affected groups can realistically benefit.
Some risks exist at group level.
Stigmatization or collective identification can occur even when individuals consent.
Ethics includes the reliability of the knowledge record.
Fabrication is only the obvious edge; selective analysis, undisclosed conflicts and distorted publication also alter the evidence environment.
Preserve provenance and documented transformations.
Untraceable edits make both error correction and accountability difficult.
Credit should track substantive contribution.
Honorary and ghost authorship obscure responsibility.
Financial or professional interests should be visible.
Disclosure does not eliminate bias but allows readers to evaluate relevant incentives.
Negative and null results remain part of the evidence base.
Selective publication can systematically distort what later researchers believe.
Ethical research is more than rule compliance. The core problem is whether the pursuit of knowledge respects persons, distributes burdens fairly and preserves the integrity of the evidence produced.