Respecting patients' rights in hospitals: patients' and health-care workers' perspectives.

Considering the importance of respecting and observing patients' rights, this study aimed to assess the level of observance of hospitalized patients' rights from both patients' and health-care workers' (HCWs) perspectives. This cross-sectional descriptive-analytic study reports the responses of 486 patients and 887 HCWs in a public referral university hospital. The study illustrates that patients and HCWs think patients' rights are respected at a medium level; however, HCWs reported lower levels of respect for patients' rights than patients, and senior HCWs reported even lower levels than their younger colleagues. Older patients and those hospitalized in internal medicine wards reported lower respect for autonomy and responsiveness, and patients' companions reported lower levels of respect for patients' rights than the patients themselves.

The scientific productions in Iranian biomedical ethics: A combined study of bibliometrics and social network analysis.

This study aims at increasing our understanding of the research activities of Iranian researchers and institutions in the field of biomedical ethics from 1995 to 2015. A combination of bibliometrics and social network analysis was used to examine the bibliographic data of 580 documents published on Iranian biomedical ethics in Web of Science and Scopus databases to investigate the publication trend, scientific impact, subject keywords network, and social network analysis indicators for international and cross-institutional co-authorship networks. The results showed that the publication of documents has had a consistent and increasing growth and that the citation trend has grown along with it. The analysis of thematic clusters by keyword co-occurrence network shows that Iranian biomedical ethics research has dealt with various topics and that has introduced different research directions. Researchers from 28 countries were identified in the international collaboration network. The main partners of Iranian researchers were from the US (17.8%) and the UK (9.2%). However, there is a tendency to develop and complete cooperation with researchers from different countries. The cross-institutional collaboration network comprises of 63 institutes, of which Tehran University of Medical Sciences (38%), Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences (11%) and Shiraz University of Medical Sciences (7%) have the largest share in publishing documents. The superiority of the first two universities based on centralization indicators in the cross-institutional collaboration network has caused the exchange of cross-network knowledge between and via these players. The network density indicator shows that almost half of the co-authorship links within the international collaboration network and 8% of the co-authorship links within the cross-institutional collaboration network have been implemented and that these networks are not very coherent.

Relationship among factors affecting research misconduct in medical sciences in Iran.

This study aims to determine the relationship among factors affecting research misconduct within the research system of medical sciences in Iran. Using phenomenography, the perceptions of individuals involved in the activities of macro, meso, and micro levels of the research system were investigated and 13 affecting factors were identified. The DEMATEL method revealed complicated and intertwined relationships among these factors based on the experts' judgment. Most of the macro and meso factors were in the cause group and most of the micro factors were in the effect group. The results showed that critical factors such as "Monitoring and dealing with research misconduct," "Transparency in research," "Management of journals" and "Ethical considerations in the publication of research results" escalate research misconduct. The study indicated that track the relationship among factors in the research system can provide the opportunity to explain research misconduct on a transitional path from macro to micro level.

Ethical considerations in the biomedical research: analysis of national biomedical research ethics guidelines in Iran.

The national guidelines for biomedical research ethics are approved by the "National Committee for Ethics in Biomedical Research" at the Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education as the regulatory body for biomedical research in the country. The focus of these guidelines should be on the ethical issues related to different stages of the research process, which would lead to increased research integrity and better supervision of research activities. The present study analyzed the contents of these national guidelines to clarify the ethical considerations connected to the five stages of a research process including 1) proposing, 2) approval, 3) operation, 4) documentation and 5) publishing. The findings showed that the assessed guidelines laid more emphasis on the ethical considerations related to the research operation stage rather than the proposal stage. In other words, activities such as identification of the research problem, formulation of hypotheses and questions, financial evaluation, data analysis and data interpretation did not receive adequate attention in these guidelines. Most of the guidelines presented subject categories such as the rights of participants and supervisory considerations in the "research operation stage", ethical considerations in the "evaluation and approval procedure stage", and editorial responsibilities in the "research review and publication stage". In general, despite noticeable content for guiding researchers for ethical conduction of research the national guidelines are not adequately developed to cover comprehensive and sufficient ethical considerations regarding all the activities of research.

Presentation of psoriatic arthritis in the literature: a twenty-year bibliometric evaluation.

Psoriatic arthritis is an inflammatory arthritis disabling patients with psoriasis. Bibliometric studies are tools for evaluating scientific productions in different countries, universities as well as publications related to a special topic. We aimed to perform a scientometric study to evaluate articles published under "Psoriatic arthritis" topic and also attempted to compare publications of different authors, countries, universities, and journals related to this topic. Study was performed on all articles published between 1989 and 2009. The ISI web of science was our main source. Two key words, "Psoriatic arthritis" and "Psoriatic arthropathy," were used to conduct search. Original articles were subject of further evaluation. A whole number of 3,727 article was result of our search. From this number, 1,961 (52.6 %) were original articles. Whole original articles were cited 38,613 times with average citations per item of 19.69. Gladman DD was the most popular author in this field. Articles were mostly in English (91.3 %). USA was the leading country in producing article under this topic with 463 (23.6 %) publications. University of Toronto was the first rank institution while publishing 125 (6.4 %) articles. More than half of articles were published under "Rheumatology" subject. "Journal of Rheumatology," "Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases," and "Arthritis and Rheumatism" were three journals with highest number of articles on this topic. There has been growing interest in psoriatic arthritis subject during these two decades. Between countries, institutions and journals; USA, university of Toronto, "Journal of Rheumatology," "Annals of The Rheumatic Diseases," and "Arthritis and Rheumatism" have special contributions to body of literature published under this topic, respectively.