David B Resnik

National Institutes of Health | NIH · National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)

Using artificial intelligence (AI) in research offers many important benefits for science and society but also creates novel and complex ethical issues. While these ethical issues do not necessitate changing established ethical norms of science, they require the scientific community to develop new guidance for the appropriate use of AI. In this art...

Journals and publishers are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) to screen submissions for potential misconduct, including plagiarism and data or image manipulation. While using AI can enhance the integrity of published manuscripts, it can also increase the risk of false/unsubstantiated allegations. Ambiguities related to journals’ and p...

It is a common practice in qualitative research to transcribe audio or video files from interviews or focus groups and then destroy the files at some future time, usually after validating the transcript or concluding the research. We argue that it is time to rethink this practice and that retention of original qualitative data—including audio and v...

Investigating research misconduct allegations against top officials can create significant conflicts of interest (COIs) for universities that may require changes to existing oversight frameworks. One way of addressing some of these challenges is to develop policies and procedures that specifically address investigation of allegations of misconduct...

We extracted, coded, and analyzed data from 343 Office of Research Integrity (ORI) case summaries published in the Federal Register and other venues from May 1993 to July 2023 to test hypotheses concerning the relationship between the severity of ORI administrative actions and various demographic and institutional factors. We found that factors ind...

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in research offers many important benefits for science and society but also creates some novel and complex ethical issues. While the issues raised by AI use will not necessitate a radical change in the established ethical norms of science, they will require the scientific community to develop new guidance for...

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform many aspects of scholarly publishing. Authors, peer reviewers, and editors might use AI in a variety of ways, and those uses might augment their existing work or might instead be intended to replace it. We are editors of bioethics and humanities journals who have been contemplat...

Green bioethics is an area of research and scholarship that examines the impact of healthcare practices and policies on the environment and emphasises environmental values, such as ecological sustainability and stewardship. Some green bioethicists have argued that healthcare providers should inform patients about the environmental impacts of treatm...

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform many aspects of scholarly publishing. Authors, peer reviewers, and editors might use AI in a variety of ways, and those uses might augment their existing work or might instead be intended to replace it. We are editors of bioethics and humanities journals who have been contemplat...

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform many aspects of scholarly publishing. Authors, peer reviewers, and editors might use AI in a variety of ways, and those uses might augment their existing work or might instead be intended to replace it. We are editors of bioethics and humanities journals who have been contemplat...

Scientists who manage research laboratories often face ethical dilemmas related to conflicts between their different roles, such as researcher, mentor, entrepreneur, and manager. It is not known how often uncertainty about conflicting role obligations leads scientists to engage in unethical conduct, but this probably occurs more often than many peo...

To promote ethical conduct in science, government funding agencies, academic institutions, and professional journals have defined some types of seriously unethical behaviors as research misconduct and have developed policies and procedures for reporting, investigating, and adjudicating allegations of misconduct. Behaviors that are not as egregious...

In this article, we discuss ethical issues related to using and disclosing artificial intelligence (AI) tools, such as ChatGPT and other systems based on large language models (LLMs), to write or edit scholarly manuscripts. Some journals, such as Science, have banned the use of LLMs because of the ethical problems they raise concerning responsible...

In this article, we defend an approach to autonomous vehicle ethics and policy based on the precautionary principle. We argue that a precautionary approach is warranted, given the significant scientific and moral uncertainties related to autonomous vehicles, especially higher-level ones. While higher-level autonomous vehicles may offer many importa...

Sometimes researchers explicitly or implicitly conceive of authorship in terms of moral or ethical rights to authorship when they are dealing with authorship issues. Because treating authorship as a right can encourage unethical behaviours, such as honorary and ghost authorship, buying and selling authorship, and unfair treatment of researchers, we...

In recent years, many philosophers of science have rejected the “value-free ideal” for science, arguing that non-epistemic values have a legitimate role to play in scientific inquiry. However, this philosophical position raises the question of how to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate influences of values in science. In this paper, we...

In the last decade, there has been increased recognition of the importance of disclosing and managing non-financial conflicts of interests to safeguard the objectivity, integrity, and trustworthiness of scientific research. While funding agencies and academic institutions have had policies for addressing non-financial interests in grant peer review...

The bioethical debate about using gene drives to alter or eradicate wild populations has focused mostly on issues concerning short-term risk assessment and management, governance and oversight, and public and community engagement, but has not examined big-picture- 'where is this going?'-questions in great depth. In other areas of bioethical controv...

In the last 20 years, there has been a sharp increase in the incidence of retractions of articles published in scientific journals, the majority of which are due to research misconduct. In some cases, researchers have revised and republished articles that were retracted due to misconduct, which raises some novel questions concerning authorship. Sup...

This chapter provides a brief history of animal research and examines the ethical arguments for and against animal experimentation. It discusses the animal rights views of Peter Singer and Tom Regan and considers some morally significant similarities and differences between animals and humans. The chapter also discusses oversight systems for animal...

An individual has a conflict of interest when the individual has financial, professional, personal, political, or other interests that are likely to undermine the individual’s ability to fulfill the individual’s primary professional, ethical, or legal obligations. Researchers and research institutions have a variety of financial, personal, and poli...

Data plays a key role testing scientific theories and hypotheses and forms the backbone of scientific inference. The different steps of research should be planned, monitored, reviewed, and documented carefully, and research design should include built-in safeguards to ensure the quality, objectivity, reproducibility, and integrity of research data....

In the final chapter of our book, we discuss some steps that researchers, institutional officials, government agencies, and scientific organizations can take to promote ethical conduct in scientific research. These steps include ensuring that leaders of research institutions and organizations act ethically and communicate the importance of ethics;...

Authorship is a prized commodity in science because most of the tangible rewards of academic research are based on a person’s publication record. Since the mid-twentieth century, the number of authors per scientific paper has been steadily increasing, driven, in part, by the desire to receive authorship credit and the increasing complexity and mult...

The research environment plays a key role in promoting integrity and preventing misconduct in research institutions and in the larger scientific profession. The research environment includes not only the physical environment but also, importantly, the social environment. The social environment includes relationships among investigators, trainees, a...

Scientists have ethical obligations to benefit society and avoid causing harm. Scientists can benefit society by conducting research that advances human knowledge or produces useful applications (or both); educating the public about their research through lectures, media interviews, web postings, and popular books; providing expert opinion and test...

Since the 1980s, well-publicized cases of research misconduct have increased public concerns about the integrity of research and stimulated responses from governments, research institutions, funding agencies, and journals. Surveys indicate that the prevalence of misconduct may be larger than many researchers would like to acknowledge and that it oc...

This chapter discusses the history of research with human subjects, giving special attention to trends, cases, and controversies that have helped to shape ethical guidelines and policies, such as the Nazi experiments on concentration camp prisoners, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and the Secret Human Radiation Experiments. It discusses important ethi...

Responsible Conduct of Research provides an overview of ethical, legal, and social issues in scientific research for science students, trainees, and professional scientists. Written by two leading scholars in the field of research ethics, one with a background in natural science and the other with a background in philosophy and law, the book incorp...

Collaboration is essential to scientific research. Collaboration may occur among researchers working in different institutions, scientific disciplines, or countries. Collaboration raises many different ethical, legal, and practical issues that researchers should address including authorship, publication, conflict of interest, data management, roles...

There is a growing recognition among scientists, government officials, research institutions, and the public that ethical conduct is essential to scientific research and that unethical conduct is highly deterimental. Ethical conduct in research, also known as research integrity, promotes the advancement of science and the public’s trust in and supp...

Publication is important for sharing data, methods, and results with the scientific community and disseminating knowledge that can benefit the public. This chapter provides a historical overview of scientific publication and peer review and describes the current practices of scientific journals and granting agencies. It also examines a number of di...

This chapter discusses the history and theory of intellectual property and its ethical, political, and legal foundations. It provides an overview of the U.S. intellectual property system, including discussions of patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and ownership of research data. This chapter also examines utilitarian and rights-based r...

In his book For the Common Good: Philosophical Foundations of Research Ethics (2022), Alex John London argues that the current framework for human research ethics and oversight is an assortment of rules, procedures, and guidelines built upon mistaken assumptions, policies, and practices that create spurious dilemmas and serious moral failings. He c...

Climate change is an environmental justice issue because it is likely to cause disproportionate harm to low‐income countries and low‐income populations in higher‐income countries. While climate change mitigation and adaptation policies may be able to minimize these harms, they could make them worse unless they are developed and implemented with an...

Research on people with disabilities or in rehabilitation can raise some challenging ethical issues for investigators because prospective or enrolled participants may have losses of cognitive function or difficulties with communication that compromise their ability to consent to research participation. This chapter will review some key ethical prin...

To obtain some exploratory, qualitative data on ethical issues and values in managing a research laboratory, we conducted three focus groups with experienced investigators and laboratory managers. After validating the focus group transcripts for accuracy, two coders used deductive and inductive coding to develop themes from the text. Participants r...

Buy-in to medical research requires that participating communities benefit from the data collected, and can trust how their data will be used.

This letter responds to the article “The Social Risks of Science,” by Jonathan Herington and Scott Tanona, published in the November‐December 2020 issue of the Hastings Center Report.

Every day we are exposed to thousands of chemicals (and other substances) through contact with the food we eat, the medications we take, the consumer products we use, the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the dust we touch. Most of these chemicals are naturally occurring, but many are man-made.

Decision theory is the study of how people make rational choices, where rationality is defined as taking effective means to one’s goals and conforming to the rules of logic and axioms of probability theory (Resnik in Choices: An Introduction to Decision Theory. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1987; Peterson Introduction to Decision...

Every day we make decisions involving risks, benefits, and precautions. We engage in what I call precautionary reasoning in a variety of decision-making contexts, including lifestyle choices (e.g. smoking tobacco, riding motorcycles, eating excessively), financial decisions (e.g. investing money, loaning money, purchasing goods), health care choice...

In the previous chapter, we explored decision-theoretic approaches to precautionary reasoning and found them wanting. While decision theory offers important insights into making individual and group choices involving risks and benefits, it does not provide use with adequate guidance for precautionary reasoning, because it lacks moral content. Decis...

In the first four chapters of this book, I have taken the reader on a tour of decision theory and moral theory and examined, critiqued, and defended the precautionary principle (PP). In the first chapter, I made seven key points that form the basis of my approach to precautionary reasoning. In this chapter, I will develop my approach in more detail...

In this chapter I will apply the PP to ethical and policy issues related to genetic engineering of microbes, plants, animals, and human beings. I will argue that the PP can provide some useful insights into these issues, due to the scientific and morally uncertainty surrounding the consequences of genetic engineering for public health, the environm...

As I write this chapter, the entire world is reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the worst disease outbreaks in modern history. COVID-19 is a respiratory infection caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (see Fig. 9.1). The pandemic is thought to have started in December 2019 in the wet markets of Wuhan, China, when a virus that normally...

I began this book with some general reflections on how we think about risks, benefits, and precautions. I observed that as individuals we make decisions involving precautions in a variety of situations that we face each day, ranging from deciding whether to drive to work when snow is in the forecast, to taking a new job, to seeking medical treatmen...

In the previous two chapters, I considered approaches to precautionary reasoning stemming from decision theory and moral theory.

Scientific research benefits society in many ways. The knowledge generated by science has practical applications in medicine, public health, engineering, industry, transportation, navigation, communication, education, public policy, and numerous other aspects of human life. However, knowledge can also be used to cause harm to individuals, society,...

Addressing global health is one of the largest challenges facing humanity in the 21st century, however, this task is becoming even more formidable with the accelerated destruction of the planet. Building on the success of the previous edition, the book outlines how progress towards improving global health relies on understanding its core social, ec...

This book fills a gap in the literature on the Precautionary Principle by placing the principle within the wider context of precautionary reasoning and uses philosophical arguments and case studies to demonstrate when it does—and does not—apply. The book invites the reader to take a step back from the controversy surrounding the Precautionary Princ...

A standard of evidence is a rule or norm pertaining to the type or amount of evidence that is required to prove or support a conclusion. Standards of evidence play an important role in institutional review board (IRB) decision-making, but they are not mentioned in the federal research regulations. In this article, I examine IRB standards of evidenc...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

Scientific authorship serves to identify and acknowledge individuals who “contribute significantly” to published research. However, specific authorship norms and practices often differ within and across disciplines, labs, and cultures. As a consequence, authorship disagreements are commonplace in team research. This study aims to better understand...

Authorship is commonly used as the basis for the measurement of research productivity. It influences career progression and rewards, making it a valued commodity in a competitive scientific environment. To better understand authorship practices amongst collaborative teams, this study surveyed authors on collaborative journal articles published betw...

Studies have shown that various types of biases can impact scientific peer review. These biases may contribute to a type of groupthink that can make it difficult to obtain funding or publish innovative or controversial research. The desire to achieve consensus and uniformity within a research group or scientific discipline can make it difficult for...

We conducted a cross-sectional survey of 1,540 researchers concerning their experiences with and attitudes towards the ethics of equal contribution (EC) designations in publications. Over half the respondents (58.3%) said they had been designated as an EC at least once. Although most respondents agreed that EC designations can be a useful way of pr...

Financial relationships in academic research can create institutional conflicts of interest (COIs) because the financial interests of the institution or institutional officials may inappropriately influence decision-making. Strategies for dealing with institutional COIs include establishing institutional COI committees that involve the board of tru...

There is an emerging consensus among scientists, ethicists, and public health officials that substantive and effective engagement with communities and the wider public is required prior to releasing genetically modified mosquitoes into the environment. While there is little disagreement about the need for community and public engagement prior to re...

Open science practices such as publishing data and code are transforming water science by enabling synthesis and enhancing reproducibility. However, as research increasingly bridges the physical and social science domains (e.g., socio‐hydrology), there is the potential for well‐meaning researchers to unintentionally violate the privacy and security...

Background: The open science movement is transforming scientific practice with the goal of enhancing the transparency, productivity, and reproducibility of research. Nevertheless, transparency is a complex concept, and efforts to promote some forms of transparency may do relatively little to advance other important forms of transparency. Objectiv...

Researchers have used drones to track wildlife populations, monitor forest fires, map glaciers, and measure air pollution but have only begun to consider how to use these unmanned aerial vehicles to study human beings. The potential use of drones to study public gatherings or other human activities raises novel issues of privacy, confidentiality, a...

Bioethicists and institutional review boards often worry that paying human subjects too much money for research participation might compromise informed consent by coercing or unduly influencing individuals to enroll in studies against their better judgment. However, empirical research does not support the hypothesis that payments adversely impact j...

A central ethical and policy issue regarding minimizing and managing risks of engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) is whether existing legal frameworks sufficiently protect public health and the environment. This article argues that policymakers should (1) use existing laws to regulate ENMs and the best available evidence to inform appropriate levels of...

Citizen Science refers to the consultation, participation, engagement or involvement of the general public in research. Rationales for this interaction include increased public access and involvement of citizens in research, immersion of community values relevant to research, outreach, and educational potential with the public, and ultimately, the...

An increasing number of human studies are asking participants to have substantial involvement in research. Citizens in human studies may contribute to various research activities, including study design, recruitment, data interpretation, and data and sample collection. Citizen involvement in research raises novel ethical issues for human studies, b...

Data sharing is crucial to the advancement of science because it facilitates collaboration, transparency, reproducibility, criticism, and re-analysis. Publishers are well-positioned to promote sharing of research data by implementing data sharing policies. While there is an increasing trend toward requiring data sharing, not all journals mandate th...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly called drones, have generated a great deal of controversy, partly because of their use for military and police purposes and because of concerns that they pose threats to privacy and safety. At the same time, environmental scientists are finding drones to be a powerful research tool. Because the use of drone...

Most accounts of research ethics focus on the importance of a handful of ethical and epistemological norms for the conduct of science, such as honesty, integrity, transparency, accountability, objectivity, collegiality, fairness, social responsibility, but have little to say about another, less well-known norm that also deserves attention: stewards...

U.S. federal policy defines research misconduct as fabrication of data, falsification of data, or plagiarism (FFP). In recent years, some have argued or suggested that the definition of research misconduct should also include sexual harassment, sabotage, deceptive use of statistics, and failure to disclose a significant conflict of interest (COI)....

The idea that the degree of infringement public health interventions have on individual rights should be proportional to the degree of expected benefits has emerged as an influential principle in public health ethics and policy. While proportionality makes sense in theory, it may be difficult to implement in practice, due to the inherent conflict b...