Undergraduate research involving human subjects should not be granted ethical approval unless it is likely to be of publishable quality

Small-scale research projects involving human subjects have been identified as being effective in developing critical appraisal skills in undergraduate students. In deciding whether to grant ethical approval to such projects, university research ethics committees must weigh up the benefits of the research against the risk of harm or discomfort to the participants. As the learning objectives associated with student research can be met without the need for human subjects, the benefit associated with training new healthcare professionals cannot, in itself, justify such risks. The outputs of research must be shared with the wider scientific community if it is to influence future practice. Our survey of 19 UK universities indicates that undergraduate dissertations associated with the disciplines of medicine, dentistry and pharmacy are not routinely retained in their library catalogues, thus closing a major avenue to the dissemination of their findings. If such research is unlikely to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, presented at a conference, or otherwise made available to other researchers, then the risks of harm, discomfort or inconvenience to participants are unlikely to be offset by societal benefits. Ethics committees should be satisfied that undergraduate research will be funnelled into further research that is likely to inform clinical practice before granting ethical approval.Peer reviewe

Registered replication report: a large multilab cross-cultural conceptual replication of Turri et al. (2015)

According to the justified true belief (JTB) account of knowledge, people can truly know something only if they have a belief that is both justified and true (i.e., knowledge is JTB). This account was challenged by Gettier, who argued that JTB does not explain knowledge attributions in certain situations, later called “Gettier-type cases,” wherein protagonists are justified in believing something to be true, but their belief was correct only because of luck. Laypeople may not attribute knowledge to protagonists with justified but only luckily true beliefs. Although some research has found evidence for these so-called Gettier intuitions, Turri et al. found no evidence that participants attributed knowledge in a counterfeit-object Gettier-type case differently than in a matched case of JTB. In a large-scale, cross-cultural conceptual replication of Turri and colleagues’ Experiment 1 (N = 4,724) using a within-participants design and three vignettes across 19 geopolitical regions, we did find evidence for Gettier intuitions; participants were 1.86 times more likely to attribute knowledge to protagonists in standard cases of JTB than to protagonists in Gettier-type cases. These results suggest that Gettier intuitions may be detectable across different scenarios and cultural contexts. However, the size of the Gettier intuition effect did vary by vignette, and the Turri et al. vignette produced the smallest effect, which was similar in size to that observed in the original study. Differences across vignettes suggest that epistemic intuitions may also depend on contextual factors unrelated to the criteria of knowledge, such as the characteristics of the protagonist being evaluated.</p