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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2026 May 15.
Published in final edited form as: Am J Bioeth. 2026 Mar 12;26(3):96–98. doi: 10.1080/15265161.2026.2623849

The Influence of Principlism on the Field of Research Integrity

David B Resnik a, Mohammad Hosseini b
PMCID: PMC13174097  NIHMSID: NIHMS2166763  PMID: 41817324

While there has been considerable academic discussion about the influence of Tom Beauchamp and James Childress’ landmark book, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, on bioethics scholarship and clinical practice (see Shea 2020), less attention has been paid to its impact in non-clinical settings. In this commentary, we will discuss the impacts of the core idea of this book, i.e., that ethical decision-making should be guided by ethical principles (Beauchamp and Childress 2012), henceforth referred to as principlism, on the field of research integrity.

Research integrity1 emerged as an academic field during the early 1990s. Its development was driven in part by Congressional hearings in the mid-1980s on research misconduct and financial conflicts of interest in federally funded research. These events prompted revisions to federal policies, including new requirements by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that students/trainees supported by NIH grants should receive instruction in the responsible conduct of research (RCR) (Shamoo and Resnik 2022).2 In 1991, the first journal focusing on research integrity, Accountability in Research, was launched, followed by Science and Engineering Ethics in 1995. Shortly thereafter, some highly influential monographs, reports, and textbooks on research integrity were published, including The National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine’s Responsible Science [1992] and On Being a Scientist [1995]; Penslar’s Research Ethics [1995], Resnik’s The Ethics of Science [1998], Marcina’s Scientific Integrity [2000], Sigma Xi’s Honor in Science [2000], and Shamoo and Resnik’s Responsible Conduct of Research [2002]. By the early 2000s, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), which has overseen the integrity of NIH-funded research since 1992, was funding conferences, workshops and empirical research on research integrity, and universities were offering courses and seminars on RCR for students and trainees (Shamoo and Resnik 2022).

While research integrity was emerging as an academic field, biomedical ethics had already matured as a discipline and was becoming institutionalized within universities through new departments, degree programs, and professorships. Hospitals were also forming ethics committees and hiring bioethicists to provide consultation and train healthcare staff. Medical schools were incorporating biomedical ethics into their curricula, and government bioethics commissions were issuing reports. Principlism played an instrumental role in the development of bioethics because it helped healthcare professionals and medical ethics consultants frame moral issues and dilemmas in a clear, cogent and consistent manner, and provided common vocabulary to specify unique ethical issues. Indeed, it became almost impossible to work in biomedical ethics without having a solid understanding of, and/or appreciation for principlism. Those who embraced principlism found it to be a useful tool for thinking, teaching, consultation, and research. Others used alternatives, such as casuistry, virtue ethics, narrative ethics, and care ethics (Gordon 2025).

Scholars who helped to establish the field of research integrity were inspired by the development of biomedical ethics as an example of how to incorporate ethics into a profession, and some of them adopted principlism as a method for guiding ethical decision-making in research. The first textbook on research integrity that deliberately employed a set of ethical principles was David Resnik’s The Ethics of Science, first published in 1998 (Resnik 1998). Inspired by Beauchamp and Childress’ Principlism and Robert Merton’s four norms of science (communism, universalism, disinterestedness and organized skepticism), Resnik articulated 12 principles for the ethical conduct of research including honesty, carefulness, openness, freedom, credit, education, social responsibility, legality, opportunity, mutual respect, efficiency and respect for subjects. These principles are neither inferred from abstract, top-down moral theories such as consequentialism, nor are they purely induced from bottom-up cases and examples. Instead, they are extracted through reflecting on both moral theories and particular cases, making them a modern example of so-called mid-level principles that facilitate ethical reflections, discussions and deliberations in science and research. Translated into five languages, Resnik’s book offers practical and non-controversial principles that are understandable for most if not all researchers. It is perhaps due to this accessibility that RCR educational programs emphasize the importance of understanding and following ethical principles (Kalichman and Plemmons 2007).

Because principlism has played a crucial role in the establishment of the field of research integrity, it has become a target for critique, most of which has been healthy and constructive. For example, some have defended a virtue-based approach to education and training in RCR as an alternative to principlism (Macfarlane 2010; Pennock and O’Rourke 2017). While some of these disagreements are rooted in differing preferences in moral theory and philosophical ethics, we believe that virtue-based approaches and principlism complement each other, and that both are needed to promote research integrity.

The influence of principlism on the field of research integrity extends beyond classrooms though. Important international research integrity codes and guidelines, including the World Conference on Research Integrity’s Singapore Statement on Research Integrity [2010] and the All European Academies’ European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity [2023], promulgate ethical principles. Furthermore, professional ethics codes from various academic fields, including physics, chemistry, microbiology, statistics, psychology, and anthropology, emphasize adherence to ethical principles (Shamoo and Resnik, 2022). In the US, several government documents pertaining to scientific integrity emphasize the importance of following ethical principles, including policies adopted by Department of Health and Human Services (HSS), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). As such, many of the current and longstanding ethical controversies and debates in research integrity (e.g., authorship, conflict of interests, open science, peer review, and dual use research), either directly concern how to apply ethical principles to particular situations or can be boiled down to resolving conflicts among those principles.

In conclusion, research integrity began its journey as an academic discipline by relying on (and standing on the shoulders of) principlism. Thinking about research integrity continues to push scholars to reflect on, refine, and reinterpret ethical principles in light of new challenges. Even though some of science’s norms, methods, and tools have evolved over time (Hosseini et al. 2024), ethical principles have remained as an anchor point for research integrity experts, researchers, policymakers and all other stakeholders. Principlism’s versatility has also demonstrated itself when exploring distinct ethical issues within different disciplines or deliberating about potential consequences of certain research practices/discoveries on the society, environment and the world. Furthermore, as research evolves, ethical principles can always be further specified to extract new context-specific norms and ought statements aimed to protect the integrity of research. Using principlism to discuss ethical quandaries posed by the increased use of artificial intelligence (AI) in research is the most recent example that showed the versatility of this approach. Our own deliberations and ethical analysis about the impacts of AI on research showed that although this new tool raises novel challenges, new guidance and recommendations can be developed using established ethical principles (Resnik and Hosseini 2025). However, these principles, and principlism as an approach, will likely serve research integrity only until humans are the primary contributor. The current trend of increased use of autonomous AI agents could challenge this premise because machines are shown to be oblivious to ethical principles and will flout these to achieve other goals.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The contributions of the NIH author are considered works of the United States Government. The findings and conclusions presented in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NIH, NCATS or the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

FUNDING

This research was supported in part by the Intramural Research Program (D.R.) at the National Institutes of Health and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (ZIAES102646-10), and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), grant number UM1TR005121 (M.H.).

Footnotes

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

1

By “research integrity” we mean integrity with respect to the conduct of research, including, but not limited to, integrity with respect to collecting, recording, analyzing, interpreting, and sharing data; assigning authorship credit; reviewing research; collaborating with other researchers; disclosing and managing conflicts of interest, and conducting research with human and animal subjects (Shamoo and Resnik 2022).

2

The National Science Foundation (NSF) adopted RCR education requirements in 2010. Most universities in the US now require some form of RCR instruction for all graduate students (Shamoo and Resnik 2022).

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