ArticleBioethics2017
In Defense of a Social Value Requirement for Clinical Research.
Article in Bioethics, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Narratives and tensions in the ethics of human proteomics literature: a scoping review.BMC medical ethics · 2026Pooled it
- Adaptive versus fixed designs in confirmatory clinical trials: centering the choice on ethics.Clinical trials (London, England) · 2026Article
- Reimagining Social Value to Consider the Environment: How Should We Judge the Magnitude of Benefits in Health Research?Bioethics · 2025Article
- Drug Delivery Through Placenta and Then Breastmilk for Fetal Cystic Fibrosis: Collateral Benefit and Social Good Do Not Make an Acceptable Risk: Benefit Ratio.The American journal of bioethics : AJOB · 2025Article
- Community Engagement in Research: An Antidote to the Social Value Misconception.The American journal of bioethics : AJOB · 2025Article
- Promoting Data Sharing: The Moral Obligations of Public Funding Agencies.Science and engineering ethics · 2024Article
- Defending and Defining Environmental Responsibilities for the Health Research Sector.Science and engineering ethics · 2024Article
- Enhancing social value considerations in prioritising publicly funded biomedical research: the vital role of peer review.Journal of medical ethics · 2024Article
- Algorithmic identification of persons with dementia for research recruitment: ethical considerations.Informatics for health & social care · 2024Article
- Ethical Imperatives for Working With Diverse Populations in Digital Research.Journal of medical Internet research · 2023Article
- Data-driven sudden cardiac arrest research in Europe: Experts' perspectives on ethical challenges and governance strategies.Resuscitation plus · 2023Review
- Ethical challenges of clinical trials with a repurposed drug in outbreaks.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2023Article
- The ethics of resource allocation in translational genomic medicine.Journal of community genetics · 2022Article
- Empowering local research ethics review of antibacterial mass administration research.Infectious diseases of poverty · 2022Review
- Ethical Criteria for Improved Human Subject Protections in Phase I Healthy Volunteer Trials.Ethics & human research · 2022Article
- Artificial intelligence in medicine: Overcoming or recapitulating structural challenges to improving patient care?Cell reports. Medicine · 2022Review
- Ethical considerations in international clinical trial site selection.BMJ global health · 2022Review
- Ethically designing research to inform multidimensional, rapidly evolving policy decisions: Lessons learned from the PROMISE HIV Perinatal Prevention Trial.Clinical trials (London, England) · 2021Review
- The ethics of COVID-19 clinical trials: New considerations in a controversial area.Integrative medicine research · 2020Article
- Clinical development success rates and social value of pediatric Phase 1 trials in oncology.PloS one · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Many guidelines and commentators endorse the view that clinical research is ethically acceptable only when it has social value, in the sense of collecting data which might be used to improve health. A version of this social value requirement is included in the Declaration of Helsinki and the Nuremberg Code, and is codified in many national research regulations. At the same time, there have been no systematic analyses of why social value is an ethical requirement for clinical research. Recognizing this gap in the literature, recent articles by Alan Wertheimer and David Resnik argue that the extant justifications for the social value requirement are unpersuasive. Both authors conclude, contrary to almost all current guidelines and regulations, that it can be acceptable across a broad range of cases to conduct clinical research which is known prospectively to have no social value. The present article assesses this conclusion by critically evaluating the ethical and policy considerations relevant to the claim that clinical research must have social value. This analysis supports the standard view that social value is an ethical requirement for the vast majority of clinical research studies and should be mandated by applicable guidelines and policies.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.