The industrial revolution led to the rise of diverse labouring groups with different qualifications which constituted the basis of many new professions. The variety of professions has grown considerably as the industrial society evolved into the information and technology era. Therefore, each professional group needed to formulate principles to maintain high levels in their profession. They called the combination of these basic principles “professional ethics”. Professional ethics embody personal, institutional, and corporate standards for expected behaviour from employees in the profession (Durkheim, 2003; Koehn, 2001).

Professional ethics for researchers comprise different aspects due to their scientific, collegial, and social responsibilities. The first aspect focuses on the essential virtues of the scientist to research with integrity, including courage, respect, resoluteness, sincerity, humility, and reflexivity (Macfarlane, 2009). Academic ethics also include standards of ethical conduct in science, objectivity in research, ethical issues in scientific publication, ethical issues in the laboratory, and responsibilities of scientists to society (Resnik, 2005). “Ethics of science” (EofS) is the inclusive term for all these scholarly virtues and ethical considerations (Erzan, 2008).

Researchers generally gain awareness of the intrinsic principles and extrinsic rules within EofS during their postgraduate education (Erdem, 2012). Nowadays, universities all around the world offer EofS courses to graduate students. For example, European universities have mostly given Research Ethics, Academic Integrity, Ethical Issues in Scientific Research, or Ethics and Professionalism in Science courses since the Helsinki Declaration in 1964. Turkey started to take research and publication (R&P) ethics into consideration seriously after joining the European Higher Education Area in 2010.

As a result of being late initiating EofS education, 34% of academic theses produced between 2007 and 2016 in Turkey exhibited a heavy rate of plagiarism (Plagiarism scandal hits Turkish academia, 2016). Plagiarising students were suspended from their universities for one semester as punishment (Official Gazette, 08 August 2012), whereas no serious sanctions for unethical behaviour by Turkish academics were instituted in the period 2007-2016 (Ünal, Toprak, & Başpınar, 2012). However, the Turkish government recently announced that the penalty for plagiarism would be dismissal from the academic profession (Official Gazette, 02 December 2016).

After the plagiarism scandal as well as sanctions against plagiarist students and academics, the Turkish Council of Higher Education inserted a compulsory course on R&P ethics in postgraduate education programmes (Official Gazette, 20 April 2016). Turkish universities then initiated various courses on R&P ethics in the 2016-2017 academic year. However, there is no unified curriculum or common content for these courses, and each lecturer has generated their own syllabus. In this regard, the core issues in similar courses at European universities may provide a basis for creating a comprehensive and common EofS course at Turkish universities. Therefore, the aim of this research is to identify courses related to EofS in European universities and define important topics in order to compare and combine them with their counterpart courses in Turkish universities. For this purpose, the research questions are: i) Which courses related to EofS are offered to graduate students in European and Turkish universities?, ii) What are the prominent topics in EofS courses in European and Turkish universities, and iii) What are the similarities and differences between EofS courses in European and Turkish universities?

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