Abstract
BackgroundProfessional communities such as the medical community are acutely concerned with negligence: the category of misconduct where a professional does not live up to the standards expected of a professional of similar qualifications. Since science is currently strengthening its structures of self-regulation in parallel to the professions, this raises the question to what extent the scientific community is concerned with negligence, and if not, whether it should be. By means of comparative analysis of medical and scientific codes of conduct, we aim to highlight the role (or lack thereof) of negligence provisions in codes of conduct for scientists, and to discuss the normative consequences for future codes of conduct.MethodsWe collected scientific and medical codes of conduct in a selection of OECD countries, and submitted each code of conduct to comparative textual analysis.ResultsNegligence is invariably listed as an infraction of the norms of integrity in medical codes of conduct, but only rarely so in the scientific codes. When the latter list negligence, they typically do not provide any detail on the meaning of ‘negligence’.DiscussionUnlike codes of conduct for professionals, current codes of conduct for scientists are largely silent on the issue of negligence, or explicitly exclude negligence as a type of misconduct. In the few cases where negligence is stipulated to constitute misconduct, no responsibilities are identified that would help prevent negligence. While we caution against unreasonable negligence provisions as well as disproportionate sanctioning systems, we do argue that negligence provisions are crucial for justified trust in the scientific community, and hence that there is a very strong rationale for including negligence provisions in codes of conduct.
Highlights
Professional communities such as the medical community are acutely concerned with negligence: the category of misconduct where a professional does not live up to the standards expected of a professional of similar qualifications
We found a striking difference between codes of conduct in the two communities (Table 1): while negligence is invariably listed as an infraction of the norms of integrity in codes of conduct for physicians, it is rarely so in codes of conduct for scientists
In the few cases where negligence is listed as an infraction of a scientific code, no detail is provided on what precise responsibilities scientists have for avoiding negligence: this raises questions on how such negligence provisions should translate into conduct
Summary
Professional communities such as the medical community are acutely concerned with negligence: the category of misconduct where a professional does not live up to the standards expected of a professional of similar qualifications. Since science is currently strengthening its structures of self-regulation in parallel to the professions, this raises the question to what extent the scientific community is concerned with negligence, and if not, whether it should be. Science has long left its amateur and gentleman-scientist past behind [1], yet it is only relatively recently, in the past two decades, that the scientific community has started strengthening its structures of professional self-regulation. Negligent transgressions are those that do not involve a conscious intention (or even a conscious disregard of the risks), but a failure to take reasonable precautions.. As will be documented in this paper, negligence plays a crucial role in justifying trust in professionals, and the purpose here will be to draw lessons for research integrity and scientific professionalism
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