(F-236) Building a BMES Ethics Collection at the Online Ethics Center: Evaluating and Organizing Mentoring Resources

One of the goals of the Ethics Committee of BMES is to collect ethics resources related to Biomedical Engineering and make them easily available to all members for teaching, training, and research.  Since there are many sectors of ethics in relation to Biomedical Engineering beginning with one area of relevance was deemed reasonable. Since some resources were already being collected in preparation for a special session panel at the 2022 Annual conference on “Establishing and Sustaining Effective Mentor/Mentee Relationships” mentoring was selected as the topic. An effort to collect and collate ethical mentorship materials was started following that meeting.  Additionally, a source of inspiration was drawn from a 2022 paper on the “Ethical Practices and Tips for Improving Engineering Faculty-Student Research Relationships.” [1] In the paper, the author recognizes ethical mentoring as an emerging area of study and training especially for academic researchers in engineering. Several important categories within this area of ethical mentoring were described; power dynamics, awareness of differences, and interpersonal communication with other categories likely to emerge with further research and reflection. The Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science (OEC) was selected as the site to make the collection accessible.  The OEC is an international website dedicated to maintaining, organizing, and accessing ethics resources. With a platform as such, the extended effort to emphasize ethics education in the field of mentorship dynamics can be accomplished and distributed to those that require it most.

Initially, the student team generated a plan in which they would first identify, evaluate, and categorize already appropriated resources on the OEC site. The students met with their mentors to implement their plan of action, including brainstorming possible categories, grouping together like categories, and evaluating all the sources of materials the OEC has to offer. Brainstorming sessions included the students working virtually to discuss what types of ethical resources fit within the mentoring umbrella. The mode of organization for the OEC website includes an advanced search section in which users may search by author, editor, date range, resource type, topics, and disciplines. Within the topics section lies “Mentors and Trainees,” thus the search for all available resources related to mentoring began. The categorization of resources developed organically between the students as they brainstormed an initial list that promptly grew once the evaluation of resources commenced.

The students then examined every resource within the “Mentors and Trainees” topics, which totaled 129, to determine alignment of resources within categories. Ensuring no unintended duplicates, the students created a symbol key for working simultaneously and aligning all resources. The resource collection was considered complete when the age and category of each resource and numbers per category were fully determined. The evaluation process included adding a brief overview of the ethical issue, publication year of resource, justification for presence in category, and whether it belonged within the search guidelines for “Mentors and Trainees.”

Many mentoring resources appeared to be questionably placed in the “Mentors and Trainees” topic indicating that this may be an over-utilized topic association for resources.

Additionally, there were many categories in the mentoring topic in which there were no resources. Fifteen categories had five or fewer resources allocated to them. Of those fifteen, six categories had no resources associated with them (Table X). The numbers do not take into consideration the intentionally duplicated allocation of resources that fit into more than one category. 

 The ages of the total collection of the mentoring topic ranged from 1989-2022. While there was extensive material within the 1990s, there was a lack of mentoring material within the last two decades. The graph below shows the percentage of each decade concerning the total resources within the topic. Roughly 85% of all resources are over twenty years old.

 For comparison, the total numbers per topic for a random selection of a few other topics and disciplines were evaluated; “Life and Environmental Sciences” had 49 resources, “Research Ethics” 70, “Authorship” 100, “Collaboration” 118, “Publication Ethics” had 113 resources, and “Mentors and Trainees'' had 129 individual resources. The topic of “Mentors and Trainees” had the largest selection.

 There are many valuable resources available on the OEC’s website for the “Mentors and Trainees” topic. However, this research effort identified three important improvement goals. The first is that this effort recognized that there are many topics without much content within the categories listed, such as the diversity umbrella including age, sexual identity, race, and gender. Therefore, we recommend a concerted effort to collect resources related to these underserved categories.  Second, within the OEC system, we recommend a reorganization of the resources in their topics/disciplines section for improved usability. Lastly, this effort identified the need for an expansion of resources in modern ethical mentoring content that better engages contemporary issues. The intent is for this research work to serve as the foundation for a larger recruitment drive to collect and organize a repository of contemporary materials relevant to the most pressing issues of mentoring ethics facing bioengineers and biomedical engineers today.

Dr. Andrew O. Brightman, the OEC fellow for the Community of Practice for Ethics in Biomedical Engineering, and Dr. R. Lyle Hood, Chair of the Ethics Committee for BMES, created the initial contact and started the team to act on this effort, primarily using the OEC’s resources collection. Each professor mentored one student as the two worked together throughout the semester to identify, evaluate, and organize materials for use by those in the Biomedical Engineering Society.

[1] Alarcón, I.V. Ethical Practices and Tips for Improving Engineering Faculty-Student Research Relationships. In2022 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE) 2022 Oct 8 (pp. 1-8). IEEE.