Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: May 28, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: May 31, 2019 - Jun 14, 2019
Date Accepted: Oct 29, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Examining the Ethical Implications of Health Care Technology Described in US and Swedish PhD Dissertations: Protocol for a Scoping Review
Background:
The development of new biomedical technologies is accelerating at an unprecedented speed. These new technologies will undoubtedly bring solutions to long-standing problems and health conditions. However, they will likely also have unintended effects or ethical implications accompanying them. It may be presumed that the research behind new technologies has been evaluated from an ethical perspective; however, the evidence that this has been done is scant.
Objective:
This study aims to understand whether and in what manner PhD dissertations focused on health technologies describe actual or possible ethical issues resulting from their research.
Methods:
The purpose of scoping reviews is to map a topic in the literature comprehensively and systematically to identify gaps in the literature or identify key evidence. The search strategy for this protocol will include electronic databases (eg, ProQuest, PubMed, Diva, SwePub, and LIBRIS). Searches will be limited to PhD dissertations published in the United States and Sweden in the last 10 years. The study will be mapped in 5 stages: (1) identifying the research question, (2) identifying relevant studies, (3) study selection, (4) retrieving and charting the data, and (5) collating, summarizing, and reporting the results.
Results:
The findings of this study will indicate if and how researchers, PhD students, and their supervisors are considering ethics in their studies, including both research ethics and the ethical implications of their work. The findings can guide researchers in determining gaps and shortcomings in current doctoral education and offer a foundation to adjusting doctoral research education.
Conclusions:
In a society where technology and research are advancing at speeds unknown to us before, we need to find new and more efficient ways to consider ethical issues and address them in a timely manner. This study will offer an understanding of how ethics is currently being integrated into US and Swedish PhD dissertations and inform the future direction of ethics education at a doctoral level.
International Registered Report:
PRR1-10.2196/14157
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.