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Making researchers responsible: attributions of responsibility and ambiguous notions of culture in research codes of conduct
BACKGROUND: Research codes of conduct offer guidance to researchers with respect to which values should be realized in research practices, how these values are to be realized, and what the respective responsibilities of the individual and the institution are in this. However, the question of how the...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7339540/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32635905 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12910-020-00496-0 |
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author | Valkenburg, Govert Dix, Guus Tijdink, Joeri de Rijcke, Sarah |
author_facet | Valkenburg, Govert Dix, Guus Tijdink, Joeri de Rijcke, Sarah |
author_sort | Valkenburg, Govert |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Research codes of conduct offer guidance to researchers with respect to which values should be realized in research practices, how these values are to be realized, and what the respective responsibilities of the individual and the institution are in this. However, the question of how the responsibilities are to be divided between the individual and the institution has hitherto received little attention. We therefore performed an analysis of research codes of conduct to investigate how responsibilities are positioned as individual or institutional, and how the boundary between the two is drawn. METHOD: We selected 12 institutional, national and international codes of conduct that apply to medical research in the Netherlands and subjected them to a close-reading content analysis. We first identified the dominant themes and then investigated how responsibility is attributed to individuals and institutions. RESULTS: We observed that the attribution of responsibility to either the individual or the institution is often not entirely clear, and that the notion of culture emerges as a residual category for such attributions. We see this notion of responsible research cultures as important; it is something that mediates between the individual level and the institutional level. However, at the same time it largely lacks substantiation. CONCLUSIONS: While many attributions of individual and institutional responsibility are clear, the exact boundary between the two is often problematic. We suggest two possible avenues for improving codes of conduct: either to clearly attribute responsibilities to individuals or institutions and depend less on the notion of culture, or to make culture a more explicit concern and articulate what it is and how a good culture might be fostered. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7339540 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-73395402020-07-09 Making researchers responsible: attributions of responsibility and ambiguous notions of culture in research codes of conduct Valkenburg, Govert Dix, Guus Tijdink, Joeri de Rijcke, Sarah BMC Med Ethics Research Article BACKGROUND: Research codes of conduct offer guidance to researchers with respect to which values should be realized in research practices, how these values are to be realized, and what the respective responsibilities of the individual and the institution are in this. However, the question of how the responsibilities are to be divided between the individual and the institution has hitherto received little attention. We therefore performed an analysis of research codes of conduct to investigate how responsibilities are positioned as individual or institutional, and how the boundary between the two is drawn. METHOD: We selected 12 institutional, national and international codes of conduct that apply to medical research in the Netherlands and subjected them to a close-reading content analysis. We first identified the dominant themes and then investigated how responsibility is attributed to individuals and institutions. RESULTS: We observed that the attribution of responsibility to either the individual or the institution is often not entirely clear, and that the notion of culture emerges as a residual category for such attributions. We see this notion of responsible research cultures as important; it is something that mediates between the individual level and the institutional level. However, at the same time it largely lacks substantiation. CONCLUSIONS: While many attributions of individual and institutional responsibility are clear, the exact boundary between the two is often problematic. We suggest two possible avenues for improving codes of conduct: either to clearly attribute responsibilities to individuals or institutions and depend less on the notion of culture, or to make culture a more explicit concern and articulate what it is and how a good culture might be fostered. BioMed Central 2020-07-07 /pmc/articles/PMC7339540/ /pubmed/32635905 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12910-020-00496-0 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Valkenburg, Govert Dix, Guus Tijdink, Joeri de Rijcke, Sarah Making researchers responsible: attributions of responsibility and ambiguous notions of culture in research codes of conduct |
title | Making researchers responsible: attributions of responsibility and ambiguous notions of culture in research codes of conduct |
title_full | Making researchers responsible: attributions of responsibility and ambiguous notions of culture in research codes of conduct |
title_fullStr | Making researchers responsible: attributions of responsibility and ambiguous notions of culture in research codes of conduct |
title_full_unstemmed | Making researchers responsible: attributions of responsibility and ambiguous notions of culture in research codes of conduct |
title_short | Making researchers responsible: attributions of responsibility and ambiguous notions of culture in research codes of conduct |
title_sort | making researchers responsible: attributions of responsibility and ambiguous notions of culture in research codes of conduct |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7339540/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32635905 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12910-020-00496-0 |
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