Ethics in medical education digital scholarship: AMEE Guide No. 134

Abstract

Ethics has long been a concern in medicine, education and scholarship. In the digital age, new complexities have arisen, and many medical education researchers are unprepared for the pitfalls ahead, often negotiating these in the absence of guidelines, and unaware of the many tools that can be used to assist them. This Guide takes the medical education scholar through a journey in which issues of ethics are discussed in all stages of digital scholarship: research preparation, research subject monitoring and data gathering, securing one’s data (and balancing security against accessibility), anonymising textual and non-textual data, third party identifiability in digital data, writing one’s own work (including plagiarism and paper mills), copyright (including issues of Creative Commons and royalty-free), accessing inaccessible reference material, ethically citing electronic material, and manuscript submission (including issues of selecting journals, open access and data sharing). The Guide ends with a brief look to the future. This Guide aims to be a useful tool to alert the readers to some of the most important ethical issues that need to be considered, and some practical solutions to ethical problems faced, when engaging in medical education digital scholarship.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Prof. David Taylor and anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this Guide.

Disclaimer

In this Guide, of necessity, I refer to many software products and tools. Except where explicitly stated, I have no affiliation (commercial or otherwise) to any of these, and mentioning them does not necessarily imply recommendation, and recommendations are based on personal experience only.

Disclosure statement

The author reports no conflicts of interest. The author alone is responsible for the content and writing of this article.

Glossary

Digital Scholarship: The process of using digital tools to gather, store, secure, transmit and publish research data.

Zip bomb: A small zip file, which, when it unzips, enlarges to an extraordinarily large size, thereby compromising the computer’s resources (e.g., disk-space and memory). It is also used to disable anti-virus programs by occupying their resources. An example is 42.zip, which is 42 kilobytes in compressed format, but approximately 4.5 petabytes (∼4,500 terabytes) in uncompressed format.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ken Masters

Dr. Ken Masters, PhD HDE FDE, is an Associate Professor of Medical Informatics, Medical Education and Informatics Department, Sultan Qaboos University, Sultanate of Oman. He has published on medical informatics ethics, and teaches digital scholarship ethics as part of a medical informatics course. He is a member of AMEE’s TEL Committee.