As a supervisor, you have a particular responsibility for advising the candidate on ethics-related issues associated with the thesis. In the start-up phase, you should review the most important information resources related to ethics and integrity.

Guidelines on research ethics

The Norwegian National Committees for Research Ethics have developed a set of concise guidelines for research ethics that is able to serve as an introduction to the main principles of research ethics. In addition, guidelines have been developed for the specific academic fields.

The research ethics library is an online resource for training within research ethics and offers articles written by experts in all academic fields. One article that might be of particular interest to the candidates is a text on fraud and plagiarism.

Suspicion of academic misconduct or cheating

If there is suspicion of academic misconduct in the PhD project or of cheating at exams this must be reported to the head of department. Cheating at exams in the training component may lead to annulment of exam results. Further consequences may be that the PhD candidate is expelled from the PhD programme for up to one year. For candidates who are employed as reserach fellowd at the University of Bergen no decision can be made on a general expulsion from the institution. Serious cases of cheating on tests or exams can give grounds for enforced termination. Decisions on cancellation and expulsion on the basis of cheating are made by the Central Appeals Board.

Cases of academic misconduct in the PhD project may lead to termination of the candidates' PhD student right.

The Research Ethics Committee at UiB must make an assessment of the matter before the faculty makes a decision on enforced termination on the basis of cheating or academic misconduct.

UiB prioritizes prevention of academic misconduct. The training component includes an obligatory element in philosophy of science and ethics in order to bolster the candidates' knowledge pertaining to norms in academia.

Personal and health data in research

If the candidate plans to process personal data, he/she must register and document the handling of these data. It is important that the candidate is informed on the rules for personal data relevant to her/his project. All research and student projects that handles personal data have to be registered in RETTE, UiBs system for overview and control of the treatment of personal data in research and studnet projects, in accordance with article 30 (protcol requirement). In projects that handle special categories of data (sensitive personal data) there is an obligation to seek advice with the ombudsperson of personal data at UiB. In practice, this is done by reporting the issue to NSD, who perform privacy services in reserach for UiB. After the project have been though a guidance and is registered in NSD's message archive, the project is retrieved in RETTE.

Within medical research the Regional committees for medical and health research ethics (REC) plays an important role. REC should give pre-approval on the use of health data in health and medical research, on the use of research biobanks and on exemptions from declarations of confidentiality.