Artificial placentas (APs) are technologies that mimic the human placenta to treat extremely preterm infants. Being an invasive and risky technology, it will raise important ethical questions for human trials. Hence, in this Topic Piece we provide a blueprint of further issues to investigate. First, counselling will have the double role of…

Consent is one necessary foundation for ethical research and it's one of the research ethics committee's major roles to ensure that the consent process meets acceptable standards. Although on Oxford 'A' REC (an NHS Research Ethics Committee based in the UK) we've been impressed by the thought and work put into this aspect of research ethics, we've…

The global scale of COVID-19 has constrained academics from conducting much person-facing research. Reactively, trend is increasing for digital-based methodologies capturing already existing online data. Scholars often 'scrape' user-postings from internet forums using coding algorithms and text capture tools, before analysing data, drawing…

The management of human fetal and embryological collections presents an ethical challenge that can be explored from different perspectives, particularly when considering informed consent. The "micro ethics" level focuses on parties engaged in giving and receiving human tissue while the "macro ethics" level focusses on the…

In today's online data-driven world, people constantly shed data and deposit digital footprints. When individuals access health services, governments and health providers collect and store large volumes of health information about people that can later be retrieved, linked and analysed for research purposes. This can lead to new discoveries in…

We draw on three illustrative vignettes to examine how REBs manage participants' agency in the context of qualitative research. We ask: Who owns a participant's consent? Central to informed consent is the principle of "Respect for Persons," which privileges the autonomy of individuals to make decisions about what happens (or not) to…

Progress in precision medicine is being achieved through the design of clinical trials that use genetic biomarkers to guide stratification of patients and assignation to treatment or control groups. Genetic analysis of biomarkers is, therefore, essential to complete their objectives, and this involves the study of biological samples from donor…

Past research indicates that people judge repeated statements as more true than new ones. An experiential consequence of repetition that may underly this "truth effect" is processing fluency: Processing statements feels easier following their repetition. In three preregistered experiments (N = 684), we examined the effect of merely…

Ethical reviews of research plans function as a cornerstone of good research practice in order that no harm should come to participants. Ethical concerns have taken on a new salience in a digital world where data can be generated at scale. Big data research has grown rapidly, raising increased ethical concerns. Several intersecting areas of big…

Research in early childhood settings requires careful consideration of the impact on all children in the setting, whether participants or non-participants, and evolving ethical approaches in response to children's needs. However, flexible approaches and, 'in the moment', ethical adaptations are not routinely reported as part of early childhood…

Members of research ethics committees (RECs) face a number of ethical challenges when reviewing genomic research. These include issues regarding the content and type of consent, the return of individual research results, mechanisms of sharing specimens and health data, and appropriate community engagement efforts. This article presents the…

The growing importance of researching online activities, such as cyber-deviance and cyber-crime, as well as the use of online tools (e.g. questionnaires, games, and other interactive tools) has created new ethical and legal challenges for researchers, which can be even more complicated when researching adolescents. In this article, we highlight…

For many researchers in the social sciences, including those in applied linguistics, the term ethics evokes the bureaucratic process of fulfilling the requirements of an ethics review board (e.g., in the US, an Institutional Review Board, or IRB) as a preliminary step in conducting human subjects research. The expansion of ethics review boards…

As Twitter's (or X's) influence permeates aspects of education, researchers must consider how to ethically and effectively leverage the unique types of data that this social media platform offers. This paper provides recommended methodological practice considerations for working with qualitative Twitter data toward the advancement of education…

While digital tools are often recommended for researchers, there is a lack of evidence around effective social media strategies among researchers to optimise participant recruitment and data collection. However, an 'add Facebook and stir' approach could create extra burden for participants or foil researchers' efforts. Participant recruitment…