A charter for biomedical research ethics in a progressive, caring society.

BACKGROUND: Given that advances in research continuously raise new ethical issues, a multidisciplinary working group of investigators involved in biomedical research has gathered to discuss and compare ethical viewpoints in their daily practice. METHODS: The working group has drafted a Charter for Ethics in Biomedical Research that encompasses all the steps in the research process, i.e. from the initial idea to analysis and publication of the results. RESULTS: Based on key principles for ethically responsible research, the Charter may serve as a tool for performing research, discussing research issues and training researchers. CONCLUSIONS: The Charter should stimulate researchers to think about their responsibility for research in a progressive, caring society.

From bibliometric analysis to research policy: the use of SIGAPS in Lille University Hospital.

In French hospitals, the progressive setting up of the new rating systems has obliged the university hospitals to justify a certain amount of activities such as research, training or moreover recourse, which are specific missions of the university hospitals. In order to justify research activities, the Lille University Hospital has developed for now three years SIGAPS, a full-web bibliometric software which census and analyse, the scientific publications referenced in the Medline database. After data downloading, each article is classified on a 6 levels "quality scale derived from the impact factors. The system then performs, for a researcher or a team, a report allowing a quantitative and qualitative analysis. Started in Lille in November 2004, the inventory and analysis of data is now ending. For the period 2001-2004, 2814 articles have been published in 700 different journals. The total number of articles increased from 688 in 2001 to 757 in 2004. The mean impact factor was equal to 2.26 and 15.5 % of articles were classified as A, 20.9% as B. Those results confirm the high level of research of the University Hospital of Lille, in agreement with two other national studies which ranks our establishment at the 6th position for medical research activities among the French University Hospitals. Currently a similar evaluation has now began in the 9 other university hospital which have subscribed to the SIGAPS project. We works currently on new indicators as patents, thesis or conferences, or access to other databases as Sciencedirect or Scopus via the RIS format. The next step in the project is the implementation of a meta-base which will federate the information provided by each SIGAPS system. This meta-base will then allow us to perform comparisons between different hospitals, determine the national "sites of excellence" and create some clinical and research networks.