Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic emphasized the need to review our requirements for true guidance and reliability from science and individual, professional, and public health ethics. The aim of this study was to determine the ethical and scientific perspectives of doctors about performing research during the COVID-19 pandemic and to assess anxiety levels about this topic within the framework of the literature. Doctors completed a ‘preliminary survey form’ containing questions determining sociodemographic data and statements about research and ethics during the pandemic and the ‘state and trait anxiety inventories’ in the internet environment. In our study, the alpha value was 0.90 for the state anxiety inventory and 0.70 for the trait anxiety inventory. Of the 398 doctors participating in the study, 45.2% were women and 54.8% were men. Among doctors, 89.7% stated they read articles related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The group of doctors who fully disagreed with the view that it was inappropriate to perform research during the pandemic due to the nature of the disease and transmission risks and who had read more articles than the other groups were found to have statistically significantly higher state anxiety inventory points. The COVID-19 pandemic led to many problems for scientific and ethical concepts. New concerns were added to existing ethical concerns and national and international ethics committees need to work to resolve these concerns.

Key words: COVID-19, ethics, state and anxiety inventory, research, writing papers