ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to explore some of the difficult issues facing supervisors and offer a range of approaches to encourage good practice. It looks at the complexity behind ethical dilemmas and some of the impacts that unethical research can have and we have reviewed some of the issues and values that most concern universities. Duke University researchers were caught in a national scandal in the USA when serious statistical flaws were found in the work that was supposed to identify individualised genomic treatment for cancer patients. Originally, essay mills arose because too much ‘cut and paste’ work was being detected by plagiarism detection software, so a bespoke authoring service was called for. Ethics committees have been established in most universities and within most national health services. Some ethics committees have now recognised a pattern in low-risk research and can provide a pro forma, which if it is followed will normally be covered for ethical approval.
