Reporting science with ethics: Your work is your reputation!

I have in my earlier editorials, delved on the issues of authorship, plagiarism, duplicate publication and copyright transfers. However, there is a continued need for us to adhere to the most stringent standards for patient informed consent and confidentiality in clinical research and publishing along with other ethical considerations that should be paramount in publishing any scientific study. This editorial will briefly address some of these ethical considerations.

HUMAN SUBJECTS AND CONFIDENTIALITY

If our research involves human subjects or participants, it is mandatory that we clear our protocol with the Ethical Committee or a similar body at our institution, whether we work in a college, at a hospital or at a private company. We regularly perform such steps as coding our subjects or participants by numbers or alphabets rather than using their real names, coding sites and other identifying data in a similar manner and minimizing access to the raw data. However, we must consider confidentiality again when findings are published, even if such measures have been taken during data collection. We should ensure that subject names and hospital numbers are not revealed. Ensure that in any photos of subjects their eyes are obscured so they cannot be identified. Ensure subjects have provided consent for the publication of their photos/laboratory results.

HONESTY IN REPORTING

Our research requires that we be as clear as possible in reporting the procedures we use to obtain our results. Obviously, being honest in accounting for our work is essential. How do we know what constitutes dishonesty or untruthfulness? Guenin[1] suggests two major areas of untruthfulness with which we should be concerned: Misrepresentation, in which one intentionally presents a material falsehood or, by omitting certain facts, allows a falsehood to be assumed and plagiarism, in which one takes undeserved credit for other's ideas or work. Fabrication of data or results is not only unethical, but can lead to danger for others if, for example, treatment or policy decisions are made on the basis of false findings. Another ethical issue relates to publication of so called “negative findings”. We may have gone through the trouble of testing a hypothesis or seeking an interesting finding, only to find that our hypothesis did not hold up, or nothing new or interesting has emerged. Do we then stop all work? No. Some authors have suggested that failure to report research findings in itself constitutes scientific misconduct.[2]