Coughlin Steven S, Barker Amyre, Dawson Angus
2440 16 Street, NW, Washington, DC, USA.
Research Service, Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Washington, DC, USA ; Food and Drug Administration, Rockville, MD, USA.
Public Health Rev. 2012 Jan 1;34(1):71-83. doi: 10.1007/BF03391657.
The ethics and scientific integrity of biomedical and public health research requires that researchers behave in appropriate ways. However, this requires more than following of published research guidelines that seek to prevent scientific misconduct relating to serious deviations from widely accepted scientific norms for proposing, conducting, and reporting research (e.g., fabrication or falsification of research data or failures to report potential conflicts of interest). In this paper we argue for a broader account of scientific integrity, one consistent with that defended by the United States Institute of Medicine, involving a commitment to intellectual honesty and personal responsibility for one's actions as a researcher and to practices consistent with the responsible conduct of research and protection of the research participants. Maintaining high standards of ethical and scientific integrity helps to maintain public trust in the research enterprise. An increasing number of authors have pointed to the importance of mentoring and education in relation to the responsible conduct of science in preventing transgressions of scientific integrity. Just like in clinical research and biomedicine, epidemiologists and other public health researchers have the responsibility to exhibit and foster the very highest standards of scientific integrity.
生物医学和公共卫生研究的伦理与科学诚信要求研究人员行为得当。然而，这不仅仅是遵循已发布的研究指南，这些指南旨在防止与严重偏离广泛接受的研究提出、开展和报告科学规范相关的科学不端行为（例如，伪造或篡改研究数据或未报告潜在利益冲突）。在本文中，我们主张对科学诚信进行更广泛的阐释，这与美国医学研究所所捍卫的观点一致，即要致力于学术诚信以及作为研究人员对自身行为承担个人责任，并践行与负责任的研究行为及保护研究参与者相一致的做法。维持高标准的伦理与科学诚信有助于维护公众对研究事业的信任。越来越多的作者指出，在预防违反科学诚信行为方面，指导和教育对于负责任的科学行为至关重要。与临床研究和生物医学一样，流行病学家和其他公共卫生研究人员有责任展现并培养最高标准的科学诚信。
