Abstract
This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. In the 21st century, medical ethics has been combined with informatics ethics to form medical informatics ethics, and medical education researchers need to be aware of medical informatics ethics principles. An important medical informatics ethics principle is guarding against excess: gathering only those data that are required, and using all the data that have been gathered. An example of excessive data gathering can be found in the gathering of demographic data: it is considered excessive when these data are gathered for no explicit reason, used minimally in the Results, and mostly ignored in the Discussion. This paper details the problem of excessive data gathering, and then outlines five steps requiring the cooperation of institutional ethics review boards, researchers, journal editors and journal reviewers that should be followed in order to guard against excess in medical education research.
Highlights
Medical Informatics EthicsMedical practitioners and researchers are well aware of medical ethics principles
The digital world, has its own set of ethical principles stemming from informatics and information science, and these are well-entrenched as informatics ethics (Severson, 1997) and even informatics laws.(European Parliament, 1995)
When medical ethics and informatics ethics combine, the result is medical informatics ethics. This is not the place to go into detail about medical informatics ethics, there are some useful introductions to the topic.(de
Summary
Medical practitioners and researchers are well aware of medical ethics principles. Much of our guidance in medical research practice stems from the Medical Cases in the Nuremberg Trials (Nuernberg Military Tribunals, 1949a, 1949b), the resultant rulings (Nuernberg Military Tribunals, 1949b) that led to the Nuremberg Code (Anonymous, 1947), and the Declaration of Helsinki.(WMA, 2008). Readers can perform an experiment of the five medical education papers involving surveys that they read: look at the demographic data and ask yourself about the use of those data in the paper, apart from a simple listing. For example, a reviewer queries why the researcher did not gather the students’ genders, the response should be that the literature does not indicate that this is a significant factor, and that the gender has as much relevance to the topic as the students’ hair length or eye colour By following these steps, we can guard against excess in medical education research data gathering
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