Research Ethics Guidance: Ethical Challenges in Supervising Theses and Dissertations in Iran

The aim of this article is to identify the ethical challenges of supervising theses and dissertations and to develop ethical codes appropriate to these challenges. The process of achieving this goal consists of four steps: defining ethical principles, extracting ethical challenges, examining the relationship of these challenges with the academic context of Iran, and formulating ethical codes for supervising theses and dissertations. 

In the first step, a set of ethical principles that can serve as the ethical foundation for the research supervision profession is introduced and justified. In the second step, the challenges of research supervision are extracted from the literature, studies, and regulations of various universities. In the third step, through a survey of several faculty members and graduate students/alumni using the Delphi technique, we address the question of how prevalent these challenges are in the academic context of Iran, as well as what additional challenges can be added to the extracted ones. The results of this step indicate a high correlation of these challenges with the context of Iran. 

Given that professors and students, as the two main stakeholders in the research supervision profession, participated in this study, it allowed for a comparison of their ethical perspectives. In some cases, students and professors had divergent views regarding the significance and occurrence of certain challenges. Finally, in the fourth step, based on the identified challenges and in accordance with their instances, 36 independent codes were developed for the set of challenges, and the relevance and comprehensiveness of the codes were assessed with the help of a focus group.