Research bioethics by author instructions in scientific journals

Abstract

The quest for “truth” is the main concern of scientific researchers. Nowadays, this “truth” is made known to the scientific community through publication in scientific journals. By watching over the journals’ quality, editors try to ensure that findings are properly transmitted. To that end, the “Instructions for Authors” posted on the journals inform researchers on the requirements a manuscript must fulfil in order to be considered for publication, and usually state the need of an expert peer review prior to publication.

Thus the “Instructions for Authors” are the means for researcher to learn the editorial policy of a given journal, to which the manuscript has to abide. A published paper, however, can be the result of a previous ethical misconduct, potentially arising from improper data acquisition, misuse if laboratory animals, breaching informed consent or the patients’ privacy, or non-compliance with the Helsinki’s Declaration on human experiments, among others.

Moreover, misconduct may also happen while writing the manuscript, in ways such as making up data, plagiarism, including “honorary” authors or republishing old data. Considering the above, it appears sensible that the “Instructions for Authors” should not only control the quality of the scientific work submitted for publication, but also instruct authors to comply with a number of requirements bound to ensure the publication is ethically sound.

The aim of the present article was to study the “Instructions for Authors” from a variety of scientific journals, examining their ethical criteria and thus, the ethical control they indirectly imposed on scientific researchers. To this aim, we reviewed the “Instructions for Authors” fro 37 journals currently available at the library of the University of Murcia ()Spain. We selected four different areas: Physiology, Clinical Medicine, Pharmacology and Cellular Biology, as fields where human and/or laboratory animal research is common. Any information pertaining to ethical issue was assigned to one of three areas: publishing ethis, animal research ethics and human research ethics.

The results show that not all journals provide in their “Instructions for Authors” for these three ethical aspects. Although requirements concerning the ethics of publishing are ever presents, this is not the case when it comes to human and animal research. Also, the umber and sterness of ethical requirements are different in between journals and research fields. In general, Physiology and Clinical Medicine journals are more demanding, while those of Cellular Biology impose a smaller number of ethical requirements. In conclusion, although some journals do require researchers to comply with a significant number of ethical issues, they still fall short of demanding the high ethical standards that would be desirable. As consequence and to a large extent, ethical control in the scientific community is left to the moral sense of researchers themselves.