Medical Students’ Knowledge about Research Ethics

Abstract

Medical students’ concerns about research publishing increase the need for evaluate their knowledge about
research ethics and misconduct issues. This study carried out through Facebook group contains all sixth
year medical students at the University of Jordan to evaluate medical students’ knowledge about research
ethics using an adopted questionnaire of 3 parts. 158 (39.5%) out of 400 students answered the
questionnaire 107 (67.3%) were females and 52 (32.7) were males, only 18 (11.4%) of them had attended
extra courses, and 23 (14.6%) had co-authored published manuscript, 129 (81.6%) of them had heard
about research ethics, while most of them knew that publication ethics in research are an essential elements
of paper writing, their knowledge about other aspects vary from about 4.4% for the time researcher need to
wait before resubmit the manuscript again and 42.8% for plagiarism definition. A score of ten had been
calculated for each student with an average of 2.4 and median of 3. In conclusion, the students need more
training on research ethics and misconduct as their knowledge about it was inadequate.