Ethics for Graduate Researchers: A Cross-disciplinary Approach

This edited collection is intended as a primer for core concepts and principles in research ethics and as an in-depth exploration of the contextualization of these principles in practice across key disciplines. The material is nested so that readers can engage with it at different levels and depths. It is unique in that it combines an analysis of complex ethical debates about the nature of research and its governance with the best of case-based and discipline-specific approaches.

It deals with the following topics in depth: in the natural sciences, it explores the scientific integrity of the researcher and the research process, human cloning as a test case for the limits to research, and the emerging ethical issues in nanotechnology; in the health sciences, it takes up the question of consent, assent and proxies, research with vulnerable groups and the ethics of clinical trials; in the social sciences, it explores the issues that arise in qualitative research, interviews and ethnography; and in the humanities, it examines contested archaeologies and research in divided societies.

1. Recognising traditions of argumentation in philosophical ethics
  Linda Hogan and Maureen Junker-Kenny
2. Ethical Issues in Scientific Research: Data Selection, Collaboration, Publication.
  Alan L. Kelly
3. The Ethical Integrity of the Researcher
  Frank Gannon
4. Ethics and Law in the EU
  Dietmar Mieth
5. Ethics as consensus management in expert cultures or through civic debate in the public sphere
  Dietmar Mieth
6. Nanomedicine in European Ethics Regulation
  Hille Haker
7. International Agreements on the Prohibition of Reproductive Cloning as a Test of the Limits of Research
  Sigrid Graumann
8. Key concepts and models of ethical agency: development of discipline-specific themes
  Maureen Junker-Kenny, Linda Hogan and Cathriona Russell Russell
9. Informed consent, assent and proxy consent in the care of people from vulnerable groups
  Des O’Neill
10. Non-therapeutic Medical Research on Persons Unable To Consent
  Sigrid Graumann
11. Contested archaeologies, archaeology in politics and identity formation
  Deirdre Stritch
12. Research Ethics in Divided Societies
  Gladys Ganiel
13. Ethics of Oral Interviews with Children
  Elizabeth Nixon
14. Ethics and Environmental Considerations in Research
  Cathriona Russell Russell
15. Synthetic Biology: an Emerging Debate in European Ethics
  Hille Haker
16. Lessons from Teaching Research Ethics across the disciplines
  Amy Daughton
17. Conclusion
  Cathriona Russell Russell, Maureen Junker-Kenny and Linda Hogan