Research Ethics in Social Sciences

The ethics of research is a branch of professional ethics which deals with ethical principles that guides a research project from beginning to end. Although the ethics of research doesn’t contain a part dedicated specifically to scientific research methods, it provides norms that researches need to observe. Before now all concentration has been on the ethics of research in the medical area, but it seems that research in the social sciences and humanities are very important, because the results and findings in them are related to individuals as well as the environment over and above the academic society and also they are related to different dimensions of human life. So this paper discusses the ethics of research from three dimensions related to participant, society and researcher in order to emphasis on necessity of establishing ethical committees. The methodology is library and database research. In conclusion, doing research under the consideration of research ethics committees is necessary, because research in social science in fields containing subject, methods, and methodology approaches is various. Finally, establishing such ethical committees, is suggested to organize and to promote research ethics condition in Iran.