13
BUILDING UP
A RESEARCH ETHICS SYSTEM:
EXPERIENCE OF A TEACHING
UNIVERSITY
Kam Cheong Li and Billy T. M. Wong13.1 Overview
Contemporary higher education has witnessed a growing emphasis
on research. This trend has shifted academics’ work priorities, and
teaching institutions have experienced mounting pressure to enhance
their research capacity (Cummings and Shin, 2014). Sursock (2015)
showed that there are now fewer “primarily teaching-oriented”
institutions in Europe, and instead more are “both teaching-oriented and
research-based”. This trend of placing more stress on research has also
been reported in studies on individual institutions in regions such as
Malaysia (Latif and Subramaniam, 2016), Vietnam (Nguyen, Klopper
and Smith, 2016) and Hong Kong (Lee, 2014). The “publish or perish”
syndrome is now more widespread, driving academics to continually
deliver research products in refereed journals and other publication
venues (Chou, 2014).
With the growth in research activities, research ethics issues have to
be better governed and staff awareness and knowledge of research ethics