Valkenburg Govert, Dix Guus, Tijdink Joeri, de Rijcke Sarah
Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands.
Present Address: Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture, Faculty of Humanities, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway.
BMC Med Ethics. 2020 Jul 7;21(1):56. doi: 10.1186/s12910-020-00496-0.
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.
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.
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.
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.
研究行为准则为研究人员提供了指导，涉及在研究实践中应实现哪些价值观、如何实现这些价值观以及个人和机构在其中各自的责任是什么。然而，关于个人和机构之间责任如何划分的问题迄今很少受到关注。因此，我们对研究行为准则进行了分析，以调查责任是如何定位为个人责任或机构责任的，以及两者之间的界限是如何划定的。
我们选择了12项适用于荷兰医学研究的机构、国家和国际行为准则，并对其进行了仔细阅读的内容分析。我们首先确定了主导主题，然后调查了责任是如何归于个人和机构的。
我们观察到，责任归于个人还是机构往往并不完全明确，文化概念作为此类归属的一个剩余类别出现。我们认为这种负责任的研究文化概念很重要；它在个人层面和机构层面之间起到了中介作用。然而，与此同时，它在很大程度上缺乏实证依据。
虽然许多个人和机构责任的归属是明确的，但两者之间的确切界限往往存在问题。我们提出了两条改进行为准则的可能途径：要么明确将责任归于个人或机构，减少对文化概念的依赖，要么使文化成为更明确的关注点，并阐明文化是什么以及如何培育良好的文化。
