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Research ethics is not concerned only with protecting participants. Ethical research also requires foreseeable risks to researchers and research teams to be identified, minimized, and appropriately managed.
Read Guide →Fieldwork and data collection can expose researchers to risks ranging from physical danger and harassment to emotional distress, legal problems, and digital threats. The relevant risks depend on what researchers do, where they do it, and whom or what they encounter.
Read Guide →Researcher safety is rarely the responsibility of one person or committee. Researchers, principal investigators, supervisors, institutions, and ethics committees have different but overlapping roles in identifying and managing risk.
Read Guide →Working alone with a participant is not automatically unsafe or unethical. The decision should depend on the participant, setting, activity, researcher, available safeguards, and consequences if something goes wrong.
Read Guide →If a participant becomes aggressive, threatening, or unsafe, completing the interview is no longer the priority. Researchers should protect immediate safety, disengage when necessary, seek assistance, and follow the project's incident and reporting procedures.
Read Guide →Researchers can be psychologically affected by repeated or intense exposure to participants' traumatic experiences and distressing research materials. Vicarious trauma is one possible response, but it should not be confused with every instance of emotional distress or burnout.
Read Guide →Repeated exposure to traumatic stories or materials should be treated as a foreseeable research risk when the study makes it likely. Preparation should address the work itself, not merely tell individual researchers to cope with its effects.
Read Guide →Supervisors should not treat student safety as the student's responsibility alone. Ethical supervision includes helping students identify risk, prepare appropriately, access support, and change or stop unsafe research when necessary.
Read Guide →Researchers are not automatically responsible for solving every problem they encounter. A stronger duty to act may arise, however, when serious harm is foreseeable or imminent and safeguarding, professional, legal, or research-specific responsibilities apply.
Read Guide →Data cleaning becomes problematic when changes stop correcting or consistently processing the data and instead distort what the research actually found. The boundary depends on justification, consistency, provenance, transparency, and whether decisions are driven by desired results.
Read Guide →Excluding participants is not inherently falsification. It becomes an integrity concern when participants are removed without a defensible basis, particularly when exclusions are selected because they produce a preferred result and the research is then represented inaccurately.
Read Guide →Changing a coding decision after seeing an outcome is not necessarily misconduct. Revisions may correct errors or improve a coding framework, but outcome-driven recoding can become problematic when it distorts the research record or selectively creates a preferred result.
Read Guide →A research image, quotation, case, or example can be completely authentic and still contribute to a misleading account when it is selected unrepresentatively. Selection becomes an integrity concern when omission causes the research record to misrepresent what the evidence actually shows.
Read Guide →Plagiarism in research is not limited to copying sentences. It can involve taking another person's words, ideas, processes, results, or other intellectual contributions without giving appropriate credit.
Read Guide →Analytical flexibility is often unavoidable in research. It becomes questionable when researchers use that flexibility to favor desired results while concealing how analytical decisions were made.
Read Guide →Selective outcome reporting occurs when the outcomes presented in a research report are influenced by their results. Omitting, incompletely reporting, or selectively emphasizing outcomes can give readers a distorted picture of the study.
Read Guide →Not every analysis you run must appear in the main paper, but statistical nonsignificance is not a sound reason for omission. The key question is whether the analysis is necessary to understand or evaluate the study's claims.
Read Guide →A funder may legitimately contribute expertise to study design and analysis. The concern arises when an interested sponsor controls methodological or analytical choices in ways researchers cannot independently evaluate, challenge, or report transparently.
Read Guide →A limited publication delay can be reasonable when it serves a defined purpose such as patent filing or review of confidential information. Researchers should be wary of clauses that let a sponsor postpone unfavorable findings indefinitely or control when research enters the scientific record.
Read Guide →An effective conflict-of-interest management plan changes how the research operates so the competing interest has fewer opportunities to influence consequential decisions. It should specify concrete restrictions, independent safeguards, monitoring responsibilities, and what happens if the conflict or project changes.
Read Guide →An undeclared conflict discovered after a study is complete should be reported promptly rather than quietly added to future disclosures. The next step is to determine what should have been disclosed, whether the conflict affected the research, and what correction, retrospective review, management, or mitigation is required.
Read Guide →Research records are more than the data reported in a paper. Learn what evidence researchers should preserve and why trustworthy records are essential for reconstructing, verifying, and defending research.
Read Guide →A research audit trail documents how evidence, decisions, and analyses developed throughout a study. Understand what belongs in an audit trail, how it differs from ordinary recordkeeping, and why its value extends beyond regulatory compliance.
Read Guide →A useful audit trail should allow an authorized reviewer to trace research findings back to their supporting evidence and consequential decisions. Learn what must be reconstructable, how much detail is sufficient, and how to test whether your documentation works.
Read Guide →Two researchers may document the same event differently without either account being deliberately misleading. Learn how to investigate conflicting research records, evaluate the available evidence, document reconciliation, and recognize when a discrepancy requires formal review.
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