Journal of Iranian Social Studies

Abstract Developing and implementing the code of conduct and guidelines of professional ethics in science is one of the foremost necessary and obvious measures of scientific associations in promoting the ethics of science, which is typically developed within the framework of scientific activity. Focusing on a sample of the code of conduct of the world scientific associations, this paper seeks to answer these questions: What are the principles of professional ethics among world scientific associations? what principles do scientific associations agree on and to what extent? To answer the aforementioned questions, we investigated 235 codes of professional ethics written in the code of conduct of 28 scientific associations. The findings show that the professional codes have multiple structures with different frequencies. There is a further agreement on some codes in scientific associations which we call "consensus codes". These codes form the core parts of conducts. On the other hand, we have specific diverse codes called "distinction codes" that are formed in terms of the cultural diversity of the scientific field. In general, the discovery of the profile of codes of professional ethics at the global level is the main achievement of this research.