Ethical values of researchers: bibliographic analysis of current trends.

Background: Ethical research in general, as well as ethical authoring or publishing in particular, are essential for researchers at any stage of their careers. In fact, ethical awareness in science is of particular importance for the first-stage researchers and is to be carefully nurtured at the earliest convenience. This task becomes especially relevant in view of numerous malpractice cases. Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to present the existing trends in the ethical issues and values of researchers using bibliographic analysis of the publications on various aspects of research ethics indexed in the Scopus database for the period of 2012-2021. Design/methodology/approach: The Scopus and VOSviewer tools, bibliographic and bibliometric analysis alongside with comparison, clustering, generalization, and network map visualization were used to analyze and visualize the obtained data. Findings: A keyword-based search using the units of «research integrity» and «research misconduct» within an array of 710 articles under analysis has demonstrated a marked year-on-year growth in the researchers’ interest towards ethical problems in various research. A similar trend is seen in the “scientific misconduct” discourse, which, being mainstreamed in the context of Open Science, has been further problematized by the widespread digitization of the scientific environment, as well as the spread of new metrics for evaluating scientific activity, including those used by grant-makers. The selected array of scholarly papers helped locating and mapping existing trends within a cluster of publications devoted to the study of researchers’ ethical values at the levels of countries, universities, thematic loci and dominant thematic lines of the problem field under consideration. Conclusions: The article is of interest to the researchers, representatives of the ethical research committees, research departments and laboratories engaged in research activities that require compliance with currently accepted global ethical standards for research.