Collaborative writing in academic medicine gives rise to more richly informed scholarship, and yet challenging ethical issues surrounding authorship are commonly encountered. International guidelines on authorship help clarify whether individuals who have contributed to a completed scholarly work have been correctly included as authors, but these guidelines do not facilitate intentional and pro...

Electronic health records, data sharing, big data, data mining, and secondary use are enabling exciting opportunities for improving health and healthcare while also exacerbating privacy concerns. Two court cases about selling prescription data, the Sorrell case in the U.S. and the Source case in the U.K., raise questions of what constitutes "privacy" and "public interest"; they present an oppor...

Recommendations advising against mothers and their infants sharing a bed during sleep (bedsharing) have sparked heated debate in recent years, the effects of which are that bedsharing is now most often only considered in the polarised contexts of being either 'the norm' or 'inherently unsafe'. This has resulted in significant tensions between supporters of bedsharing and public health bodies wh...

The need for ethical reflection relating to the accountability of anthropological researchers has been an implicit part of the discipline ever since it became established in Britain and the US in the first half of the nineteenth century. This is because the 'field' and relationships stemming therefrom have been central in defining the nature of anthropological knowledge itself. The past two dec...

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines professionalism as “the conduct, aims and qualities that characterize or mark a profession or a professional person.” Within the context of the physician professional, there is a serious but largely unwritten understanding, both within the profession and among the public at large, that physicians must hold themselves up to high ethical and clinica...

Local review of research by ethics committees in the UK has long been held to be an important right of the local research ethics committee and, even with the introduction of the European Clinical Trials Directive, the governance arrangements for research ethics committees continue to allow for local review of multicentre studies. There is no requirement for local review in either the European U...

Article history: Received: 18-06-2015 Revised: 24-09-2015 Accepted: 11-11-2015