Research Supervision Ethics; Identifying the Ethical Challenges of Dissertations/Theses Supervision in Iran and Providing Code of Ethics

The purpose of this paper is to identify the ethical challenges of dissertations/theses supervision in Iran and to provide the codes of ethics for supervisors according to the challenges. The process of achieving this goal has consisted of four steps: determining ethical principles for supervision as a profession, identifying ethical challenges, examining the relationship between the challenges and the Iranian academic context, and codifying the ethical duties of supervisors. Accordingly, in the first step, a set of ethical principles that can be an ethical basis for research supervision as profession is justified. In the second step, research supervision challenges are extracted from the literature-researches as well as the regulations of various universities and institutes. In the third step, surveying a number of faculty members and graduated/graduate students we asked them how many of the challenges occur in the Iranian academic context, and also what other challenges can be added to our list of the challenges. The results of this step indicated the high relevance of the challenges to Iranian academic context. Due to the fact that both groups of supervisors and students participated in this research, it was possible to compare their ethical perspectives as well. In some cases, students and faculty members had divergent views on the importance and occurrence of some of the challenges. Finally, in the fourth step, based on the obtained challenges and in accordance to their instances, 36 independent codes were provided, and their relevance and comprehensiveness was evaluated in a focus group.