This article seeks to provide methodological frameworks for research on the issue of “research ethics” and therefore proposes the central topics of the discussion structure. The main question is what issues should be considered in order to research the issue of research ethics and what is the method of its design and analysis?

The issue of “research ethics” in Persian literature is often reduced to the level of individual behavioral recommendations or professional codes and is less analyzed as a methodological issue, especially from the perspective of scientific philosophy studies. Therefore, in popular literature, it is often reduced to a set of behavioral rules or individual virtues of the researcher, and this kind of reductionism has hindered the structural and methodological understanding of this field of knowledge. This article, adopting a critical approach within the scope of philosophy of science studies, seeks to reconstruct the methodological frameworks of research in research ethics and attempts to analyze research ethics not as a branch of applied ethics, but as a matter of structural self-awareness of the social network of science. The question is what is the unit of analysis of the issue of research ethics and what is the appropriate methodological structure and framework that can enable its comprehensive analysis? In analyzing the issue, first the concept of research ethics is promoted from the individual normative level to the collective, structural, and network levels, and then the relationship between ethics and research is analyzed at four levels: individual, group, organizational, and social, and shows that research ethics at the level of the social network is the production of knowledge that has the ability to analyze social realities. The article shows that research ethics is not simply a set of individual moral virtues, but rather a network of conscious and unconscious mechanisms in collective, institutional, and social contexts. Finally, the “multilevel network/critical analysis” model is presented as a methodological framework that formulates research ethics in four layers: individual, group, organizational, and social, and can serve as the basis for research in this area. As a result, research ethics can be proposed as a condition for the sustainability of scientific rationality and a self-correcting mechanism of the social knowledge system.

Research ethics is the intersection of "research" and "ethics," and in other words, the intersection and explanation of how research studies on the "research problem" are related to research studies on the "ethics problem." If we go a little further and look at the problem from a philosophical perspective, we can say that it is the determination and analysis of the relationship between the philosophy of research and the philosophy of ethics. Thus, it will be very important and key to define the position of the discussion in which field and in which category of existing and emerging trends in the field of humanities, which will show itself in the same proportion, designing the problem statement and then determining the method of solving and analyzing the problem. The angle of view of this article on the issue of research ethics is not from the perspective of ethics and the conventional categories of applied ethics, normative ethics, and metaethics. Rather, it is from the perspective of scientific philosophy studies and within the framework of methodological studies. In the author's opinion, research ethics should be examined first and foremost within the philosophy of research and then naturally within the scope and under the umbrella of studies in the philosophy of science, rather than assuming that research ethics issues are merely a subset of ethical studies or the science of ethics.