The problem of ‘research ethics’ is concerned with which aspect of research…

Concept: Research ethics is the normative branch of research methodology. It fixes the moral obligations a researcher carries — honesty, integrity, accountability and fair credit — and asks what a researcher ought and ought not do while producing and communicating knowledge. Decisions about layout, statistical technique or sampling belong to presentation and method, not to this normative domain.

Application: Sort the aspects offered here by the kind of demand each one makes. Reporting research on the basis of evidence is a normative demand: every claim placed in the report must be traceable to data that were actually collected, which is what rules out fabrication of results, falsification of data and the selective suppression of inconvenient findings. That is exactly the territory research ethics governs.

Contrast with the other aspects:

• Following the prescribed format of a thesis — a presentational convention laid down in the university manual: chapter sequence, citation style, margins and front matter. Departing from it is a formatting lapse, corrected by re-typing the document.

• Data analysis through qualitative or quantitative techniques — a methodological choice about which coding scheme or statistical test suits the data in hand. It is judged by appropriateness and rigour of method.

• Defining the population of research — a sampling-design decision that fixes the universe of units the study speaks about and the inclusion criteria. It settles how far the findings can be generalised.

Cross-check: the violations catalogued under research ethics — fabrication of results, falsification of data, plagiarism, misrepresentation of findings and improper authorship credit — all turn on the honesty of what a researcher records about the work and puts on record for others, and it is in the report that they finally take public shape. Among the four aspects offered here, that honesty requirement attaches to the reporting of research on the basis of evidence, while the remaining three are procedural, methodological or design choices. Hence the aspect that research ethics is concerned with is evidence based research reporting.