Neuroethics and fMRI: Mapping a Fledgling Relationship
Alex Garnett1,2, Louise Whiteley1, Heather Piwowar3, Edie Rasmussen2, Judy Illes1*
1National Core for Neuroethics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 2 School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies, University of
British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 3National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, Durham, North Carolina, United States of America
Abstract
Human functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) informs the understanding of the neural basis of mental function and
is a key domain of ethical enquiry. It raises questions about the practice and implications of research, and reflexively informs
ethics through the empirical investigation of moral judgments. It is at the centre of debate surrounding the importance of
neuroscience findings for concepts such as personhood and free will, and the extent of their practical consequences. Here,
we map the landscape of fMRI and neuroethics, using citation analysis to uncover salient topics. We find that this landscape
is sparsely populated: despite previous calls for debate, there are few articles that discuss both fMRI and ethical, legal, or
social implications (ELSI), and even fewer direct citations between the two literatures. Recognizing that practical barriers
exist to integrating ELSI discussion into the research literature, we argue nonetheless that the ethical challenges of fMRI, and
controversy over its conceptual and practical implications, make this essential.
Citation: Garnett A, Whiteley L, Piwowar H, Rasmussen E, Illes J (2011) Neuroethics and fMRI: Mapping a Fledgling Relationship. PLoS ONE 6(4): e18537.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0018537
Editor: Angela Sirigu, French National Centre for Scientific Research, France
Received January 26, 2011; Accepted March 3, 2011; Published April 22, 2011
Copyright:  2011 Garnett et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits
unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: Generously supported by NIH/NIMH RO1#R01MH84282, CIHR/INMHA CNE#85117, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, and the British Columbia
Knowledge Development Fund. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
* E-mail: jilles@interchange.ubc.ca
Introduction
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is an increas-
ingly popular noninvasive method for studying the functional
anatomy of the human brain. fMRI experiments correlate mental
phenomena with a hemodynamic measure of brain metabolism,
and the resulting data are often presented as an anatomical map of
the brain regions purportedly involved in the mental phenomenon
of interest. The domains in which fMRI has been applied are
highly diverse, ranging from language comprehension or short-
term memory to personality traits, political behavior, or aesthetic
judgment [1]. fMRI raises key ethics questions throughout the
research process: from the conceptualization of experiments
through their design, conduct, and analysis, to the interpretation
and dissemination of results, and the possible implications and
applications of research [2–4]. Here, we briefly review the
neuroethics of fMRI [5], focusing on issues most relevant to the
researcher. We consider arguments for bringing discussion of
ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) into the primary
research literature, and review barriers to such activity. We then
use bibliometric methods to map out the ELSI landscape for
fMRI, highlight salient topics and citation relationships, and reveal
the degree to which calls for ethics discussion in the research
literature have been heeded.
In the research context, fMRI raises familiar issues of informed
consent [6] and hotly debated questions about the investigation of
incidental findings [7], inflected by the potential impact of
neurological conditions on cognition and selfhood [5,8]. In the
clinical context, explaining and treating mental illness in biological
terms is deeply controversial, and it remains unclear whether
neuroimaging practices for diagnosis and treatment will benefit
patients [9]. The effect on participants of taking part in
neuroimaging research studies of psychiatric conditions is also
unclear; recent studies suggest that brain scans are powerful tools
for shaping or reinforcing concepts of a ‘disordered’ self [10–11].
fMRI also has potential applications in legal, educational, and
economic contexts, ranging from lie detection to the justification of
cognitive enhancing drugs in educational settings [12–15].
Although many of these applications are currently speculative,
and while there is a danger of exaggerating the real-world
consequences of neuroscientific findings [16], the impact of fMRI
research on ways of thinking about education, psychiatric
classification, economics, and responsibility is already substantial
[17–22]. In the philosophical context, imaging studies of human
judgment, emotion, personhood and responsibility all have
controversial implications for ethical theory [23–25]. These
debates are intensified by the question of how brain images
should be communicated: fMRI scans are highly processed
representations of an indirect measure of neural activity, but are
often described as if they are direct snapshots of the mind in
action. They are thus rhetorically powerful, and their apparent
directness can obscure a range of contingent interpretations and
underlying conceptual commitments [26–27]. Take, for example,
the presentation of two scan images, one from a group of patients
with a particular psychiatric diagnosis and one from a control
group: the scans can imply both that the categories are distinct and
that they are biologically-based while neither may be the case [28].
Many of these issues are directly relevant to the fMRI
researcher [29]. In addition to the more transparent ethics issues
surrounding the conduct of research, the conceptualization and
dissemination of research raises difficult questions about the
researcher’s expertise and public responsibility. In designing
controlled laboratory studies of complex concepts such as anger,
wisdom, or empathy, there is much to be learned from
philosophical literatures and studies in the social sciences about
the implications of operationalizing these concepts in particular
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ways [16]. The movement of fMRI research into media reports
and real-world applications is also deeply entangled with the
researcher’s activities, contra assertions that research is neutral to
whatever might be made of it. The nascent field of neuroethics
aims to highlight, inform, and address underexplored ethical, legal,
and social issues arising from neuroscience, and to encourage
discussion among researchers and research communities [30–33].
Here we ask whether neuroethics has been successful in
penetrating the neuroimaging research domain by examining
citation patterns. Investigating bibliometric trends such as citation
patterns is a key method for understanding the development of
nascent fields such as neuroethics and their interaction with
existing disciplines, and for tracking the evolution of their often
mutable terminologies [34].
One might predict that primary research articles would not
discuss (neuro)ethics in depth, with researchers assuming that
institutional ethics approval is sufficient, and having little incentive
to engage further [35–36]. This is of concern, as ethics training
and approval is often superficial and inadequate to the particular
quandaries of neuroimaging [5]. However, one might also expect
that the increasing degree of overlap between the potential real-
world implications of fMRI research and its subject of study – for
example, in experiments pertaining to human nature, mental
contents, and moral reasoning – would be reflected in increased
overlap in fMRI and ethics content, and in cross-citations between
the two literatures. In addition, there have already been calls for
researchers to engage more deeply in ethical, social, and legal
debate within science journals [33,37], neuroethics topics are
increasingly discussed in the popular press [38,39], and neuroi-
magers are increasingly called upon to defend their encroachment
on the traditional domains of the humanities [40,41].
Methods
For bibliometric methods to accurately describe the shape of a
particular field, it is crucial that search strategies, inclusion criteria,
and visualization practices are appropriate to the domain [42]. We
therefore developed the methodological procedure described
below through collaboration between experts in information
science, scientific publication, neuroimaging, and neuroethics.
Full details are included in Table 1 and in the Appendix S1.
1. Tracking Overlapping fMRI and Neuroethics
Publications
We took as a starting point Seixas and Basto’s (2008)
bibliometrics analysis of neuroethics, the only other study of this
nature to date [43]. Although Seixas and Basto’s (2008) focus was
on impact factor and nation of origin, and on issues affecting
radiologists [43], we revisited their coding guide to provide
continuity for the present content analysis. We conducted searches
for all articles indexed in PubMed containing permutations of the
phrases ‘‘functional magnetic resonance imaging,’’ and ‘‘ethics,’’
as well as all literature containing the term ‘‘neuroethics’’
specifically, and recorded publication numbers for each year (see
Appendix A in Appendix S1).
2. Mapping the Intersection of fMRI and ELSI
We used an ISI Web of Science query to identify scholarly
articles published between 1999 and 2009 that contain both
‘‘fMRI’’ and ‘‘ethical’’ or ‘‘legal’’ as topic terms (see Appendix B in
Appendix S1).We discarded all articles that did not have abstracts
available and ‘false hits’ (articles in which the mention of ELSI was
non-substantive, e.g., a cursory reference without any discussion
within the text, or referred to a standard ethics approval process).
We sorted the remaining articles according to nominal topic
categories, augmenting the scheme used by Seixas and Basto
(2008) to reflect new facets of the literature [43]. Appendix C in
Appendix S1 lists the categories in the original and augmented
coding scheme – the only two independent additions were a
category including research on the neurobiology of moral and
ethical judgments, and a meta-ethics category to encompass
papers and reviews considering neuroethics itself.
A final coding scheme was applied by two authors (LW and
AG), and the minimal number of disagreements were resolved
through discussion. Since this kind of coding is inevitably shaped
by pre-existing ways of conceptualizing the literature, both in the
design and application of the codes, we also conducted an
automated analysis to reveal clusters of co-citing papers. This
provides a more data-driven picture of ELSI topics surrounding
fMRI, weighted by a richer measure of the prominence of each
paper in the citation landscape. We submitted the original query
results to the CiteSpace II platform for visualizing patterns in
Scientific Literature, which generates an directed graph showing
the citation links (edges) between papers (nodes, each representing
a single published article) [44]. Less well-connected papers were
filtered out using a standard pruning procedure to aid visualiza-
tion. This procedure is described in detail in Appendix D in
Appendix S1.
We also used the CiteSpace II platform to apply machine-
derived labels to each cluster, constructed from noun phrases
appearing in the constituent article titles, abstracts, and indexing
terms. Such machine-derived labels are seldom a close approxi-
mation of natural scientific language, and we therefore translated
the machine-derived labels into more salient terms already utilized
in the neuroethics literature. This translation process was
evaluated by a team with expert knowledge of the domain.
3. Citation Analysis
To specifically investigate direct citations between articles from
the two domains, we constructed a PubMed query to identify
Table 1. Research Questions and Data Sets.
Research Questions Data Set
Is discussion of the ethics issues surrounding fMRI taking place, and
if is it described using the term ‘‘neuroethics’’?
Academic papers containing permutations of the phrases ‘‘functional magnetic
resonance imaging,’’ ‘‘ethics,’’ ‘‘neuroethics’’ Source: PubMed.
What are the salient topics among articles discussing both fMRI research
and ethical, legal, and social issues?
Academic papers containing permutations of the phrases ‘‘functional magnetic
resonance imaging,’’ ‘‘ethics,’’ ‘‘legal’’ (see Appendix S1). Source: ISI Web of Science.
Are fMRI articles, and those discussing ethical, legal, and social issues,
citing each other?
Original fMRI research articles, based on detailed machine-derived query and manual
curation. Source: PubMed.
ELSI research articles, based on detailed query. Source: Scopus.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0018537.t001
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original research articles that used fMRI with human subjects
between 1999 and 2009. We excluded review articles, editorials,
meta-analyses and commentaries. A detailed analysis of how we
constructed this query is provided in Appendix B in Appendix S1.
For the purpose of data management, we retained a
randomized subset of up to 200 articles for each year and indexed
the articles by their unique PubMed identifier. To obtain metadata
on the articles, the articles they referenced, and those in whose
reference lists they appeared, we submitted the PubMed identifiers
to the Scopus citation database. For both the cited and citing
articles, we then identified the subset that contained ELSI content
using three filtering criteria. The criteria were developed through
both automated and manual analysis of the accuracy and
exhaustiveness of their results. At least one of three criteria had
to be met for an article to be included (details are provided in
Appendix E in Appendix S1):
N journal title contained the words or word fragments ‘‘ethic,’’
‘‘poli-’’, ‘‘philosophy,’’ ‘‘law;’’ or match a list of ISSNs (for
journals with less keyword-salient titles),
N article title contained the phrase ‘‘informed consent, ’’ or the
article title or abstract contain the words or word fragments,
‘‘ethic,’’ ‘‘justice,’’ ‘‘stigmati-,’’ ‘‘responsibil-’’, or ‘‘person-
hood’’.
N PubMed identifier of the article listed in Scopus and identified
by the PubMed ‘‘bioethics[sb]’’ filter.
As a final check, we manually reviewed all article titles and
abstracts identified by this filtering process and eliminated from
further analysis those not considered by the authors to be an article
about ELSI issues. We also eliminated citations not considered to
reflect substantive discussion of research ethics or ethical, legal,
and social implications. This most often occurred when a) a paper
in the ELSI literature was cited for a background statistic not
related to research ethics or implications, or b) when ELSI papers
were cited with respect to the content of the fMRI study – in other
words, cited by studies using neuroimaging to study moral, legal,
or ethical decision-making. The exclusion of citations referencing
these moral correlate studies allowed us to more accurately map
citations by fMRI research articles that indicate an additional and
substantive engagement in questions arising from the ethics of
research or its implications. Note that where a paper with a moral
correlates citation also cited an ELSI paper in the context of
discussion of research ethics or implications the latter citation was
retained. To determine the context of ELSI discussion, we located
and retained the paragraphs in which citations occurred.
Results
1. fMRI and Neuroethics Publications
As illustrated in Figure 1, the prevalence of neuroethics
publications has increased by an average of 39% each year since
the term was formalized in 2002 [31], but this number is small
overall, with 40 publications including the term ‘‘neuroethics’’ in
their title or abstract in 2009. However, this does not include those
articles that discuss both fMRI and ethics without using the term
‘‘neuroethics’’. Increases in the number of publications considering
ethics issues associated with fMRI has risen in turn with those
containing an eponymous mention of neuroethics at an average of
51% more publications each year.
2. Landscape of Intersecting fMRI and Ethics Content
Of the 134 articles referring to both fMRI and ELSI issues
returned by our query, 50 were eliminated for lack of substantial
discussion of research ethics. The 84 remaining articles came from
a broad range of journals across bioethics, the social sciences, and
law. As illustrated in Figure 2, we observed extensive discussion of
the forensic, security, and military use of fMRI, frequently in the
context of neural correlates associated with guilty feelings or
incriminating mental contents of people accused of crimes. In
terms of ‘real-world’ implications, this focus on forensic, security,
and military use was in marked contrast to the lack of discussion
about commercial use, which is arguably the most pressing source
of ethical concerns outside the research and clinical context –
private imaging clinics already offer scans for lie detection and
diagnosis of mental illness [45]. Articles that detailed the extension
of neuroscience into legal and other domains often also discussed
more general technical problems with generalizing fMRI results
across individual human subjects, and from abstract laboratory
tasks to real-world contexts. Among the articles discussing both
fMRI and ethics, and among ELSI articles citing fMRI articles,
there were fewer instances of citations relating to the discussion of
classic research ethics issues such as informed consent, incidental
findings, working with vulnerable populations, and confidentiality
than relating to the implications and limitations of neuroimaging
research. Among the fMRI articles themselves, citations of ELSI
articles were more evenly distributed among these categories,
though the small numbers involved limit the conclusions that can
be drawn. It is also of interest that among the fMRI articles citing
ELSI articles, the most common context was discussion of
technical limitations, concordant with previous observations about
the focus of critique in the print media [46].
To provide a more data-driven complement to our qualitative
topic analysis, we input the original 134 articles returned by our
query into the CiteSpace II platform. Figure 3 illustrates the
network resulting for the top cited articles. Each node represents a
paper, and the size of the node and of the corresponding label
reflects the number of times the paper was cited. The warmth of
the node colour indicates the recency of citation: pink indicates the
most recent, blue the oldest citations. The distance between the
nodes indicates relatedness: if two nodes are close together, the
papers they represent share similar content. Clusters of closely-
related papers are indicated by free-form blue shapes. Their
citation centre of mass is shown by the blue circle. The salient
neuroethics terms used to translate the machine-derived labels for
each cluster were: decision making, cognitive enhancement,
personhood, incidental findings, legal implications, minimally
conscious states, truth telling, and the term ‘‘neuroethics’’ itself. It
is important to note that the 77 nodes in this network do not
correspond exclusively to articles from the 134 articles originally
Figure 1. Prevalence of neuroethics publications, 1999–2009.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0018537.g001
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extracted from the ISI database. Article nodes were incorporated
based on a high degree of relatedness to the topic clusters,
including any highly cited articles not part of the original data set.
The only such article on our graph is the 1972 Lancet article in the
personhood cluster.
The large mass in the center describes research into moral
correlates, including fMRI studies of personhood, disgust, and
racial bias. While this largest cluster contains at least one citation
link out to every other cluster on our graph, it overlaps most
heavily with articles considering legal implications. This related-
ness between the neuroscience of ethics and its applicability to the
law was thus observed in both our manual coding and the cluster
analysis, and reflects the presence of discussion about the legal
implications of fMRI in both the popular media and legal press
[39,46–47].
Articles about incidental findings and cognitive enhancement
form relatively cloistered clusters. The most highly-cited and
interconnected node in each cluster represents one of the earliest
papers in the respective domain: respectively, Kim et al. (2002),
discussing incidental findings in pediatric MR imaging [48], and
Anderson et al. (1999) discussing the implications of early
prefrontal cortex damage [49]. The connection between prefrontal
cortex damage and cognitive enhancement may not be immedi-
ately obvious: brain injury in fact provides a striking context in
which interventions are made to enhance cognitive or behavioral
ability [50].
An eponymous neuroethics cluster also emerged, describing
those articles judged most similar purely for their use of the term,
and often arising in the context of early commentaries on the state
and aims of the discipline [e.g., 51]. Overlapping with this cluster
were those labelled ‘‘personhood’’ and ‘‘minimally conscious
states’’, suggesting that these domains are most closely associated
with the neuroethics literature; future work could investigate the
chronology of this interaction. Topics such as the diagnostic and
predictive potential of fMRI are more pervasive and less effectively
clustered, perhaps reflecting their methodological generality and
reminding us that ELSI issues associated with fMRI span
technical, research, academic, and applied domains.
3. Citation Analysis
3.1 Citations of the Ethics literature. To explore the
degree of co-citation between the fMRI and ELSI literatures, we
retrieved 3,484 fMRI articles published between 1999 and 2009.
The automated ethics filter selected an initial subset of 244 ELSI
articles cited by the fMRI articles (see Section 2.3; Figure 2). Of
these, we manually identified 137 as research articles investigating
the neurobiology of moral or ethical behavior, leaving 107 articles
concerned with fMRI research ethics or implications. We
examined the citation context of the remaining 107 articles,
yielding only 18 citations that took place as part of a substantive
ethics discussion in an fMRI article. However, this very small
proportion does appear to be increasing from a baseline of
virtually zero, at an average rate of 22% per year over the last ten
years.
The quotes below are illustrative examples of the citation
contexts in which fMRI articles invoked ELSI articles as part of a
substantial ethics discussion:
‘‘If lawyers and ethicists continue to debate whether lesion patients or
psychiatric patients with functional deficits should be considered
culpable for their immoral actions [50], it will be helpful to
acknowledge that some brain regions might be involved in only specific
subsets of moral processing because patients could conceivably be held
culpable for some types of immoral actions but not for others. Although
there is still much to explore, the data reported here lay the groundwork
for many future interdisciplinary investigations’’ [52].
‘‘This has led to concerns that some [minimally conscious patients],
who retain an awareness of self or environment, are being ‘warehoused’,
without adequate access to appropriate assessment or rehabilitation’’
[53].
‘‘Even during this period of expanded application, examiners have
cautioned that appropriate use of fMRI in special samples will require
further investigation of the influence of cerebrovascular changes on the
fMRI signal’’ [54].
3.2 Citations of the fMRI literature. Of the articles citing
the 3,484 fMRI articles selected, 43 articles published across
varied disciplines such as law or business ethics included a
substantial discussion of research ethics or ELSI implications
meeting our criteria. These increased over time at a greater rate
than the citations of ELSI literature in fMRI, at an average rate of
36% per year over the last ten years. Many of the citations of
fMRI articles in the ELSI literature occurred in the context of
Figure 2. Content analysis of neuroethics publications and citation contexts.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0018537.g002
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discussions about the technical limitations, persuasive power, or
evidentiary constraints of neuroimaging. For example:
‘‘Neuroimaging data seem particularly compelling to lay people and may
present a ‘‘unique danger because of the appearance of scientific
neutrality’’ [55].
‘‘Ethical issues related to rights against self-incrimination have caused
some companies developing forensic neurotechnologies to claim that their
products will only be used to exonerate the innocent. In this context, the
false-negative problem creates a real dilemma for companies developing
memory detection tools’’ [56].
The ELSI literature also included several citations of fMRI
studies of moral correlates, which were excluded from this analysis
in order to reveal cross-citations indicative of substantive
discussion of the ethics and implications of research itself. For
example, Salvador and Folger [57] note that ‘‘in an fMRI study,
Robertson et al. [58] presented Executive MBA students with story segments,
some of which had moral content, while others had none’’, in the context of
a separate discussion of research ethics surrounding fMRI.
Discussion
We began by arguing that that fMRI raises substantive ELSI
issues for the conduct, application, and implications of research.
We further argued that fMRI researchers should engage in debate
about these ethical issues and the implications of research, and
hypothesized that the increasing popularity and media coverage of
neuroimaging studies, and discourse surrounding real-world
implications and early commercial applications, might have led
to growing cross-citation of the two literatures in recent years.
Between 1999 and 2009 there have indeed been an increasing
number of articles published with overlapping fMRI and ethics
content. However, this number is surprisingly small in total, and
we found very few citations of fMRI research by ELSI articles, and
an even smaller number of fMRI articles that substantively cited
the ELSI literature.
In many fMRI studies, the only acknowledgment of research
ethics was a mention of informed consent – necessary, in many
cases, for publication, and a frustrating confound in our attempts
to identify more substantive discussion. For example, there were
frequent citations of the World Medical Association (Declaration
of Helsinki) ethical principles for medical research including
human subjects. While review boards can ensure that research is
being carried out in accordance with stated principles, they cannot
replace a meaningful discussion of ethics, particularly with respect
to unique and underexplored features of a new domain [5].
In addition to the reliance on ethics review boards, there are
practical, institutional, and incentive barriers to scientists taking
ownership of the ethics and implications of their research. Indeed, a
survey recently conducted with neuroimagers in Canada [59]
suggested that many neuroscientists are indeed concerned with ethics
issues, but are unsure of a productive vehicle for discussion and
Figure 3. Citation network of neuroethics publications with topic clustering.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0018537.g003
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communication. It is possible that more substantial ethics discussion
takes place in reviews, policy articles, or grant applications, and future
studies could investigate these additional domains. In any case, given
the rich discussion within neuroethics, policy debate, and the popular
press, the relative lack of ELSI content in the primary literature is
somewhat surprising and deserves further investigation.
The central topic cluster in our graphical analysis included both
moral correlates research, and discussion of the ethics issues
associated with using fMRI to putatively reveal facets or contents of
the mind – often referred to as mind-reading. In the direct citation
analysis we excluded moral correlates research, but several articles
included discussion of the neural basis of morality among other
ethics issues. We argue that these two domains naturally inform
each other: for example, neuroimaging research on phenomena
relating to disgust and their possible implications for jury behaviour
ostensibly addresses a question about the neural basis of an ethical
phenomenon, but does not answer the question of how such
knowledge ought to be used [24]. Several scholars have argued that
the nature of bioethical enquiry precludes the kind of binary fact-
value distinction implied by a separation between research ethics
and the neural correlates of ethics [24,60], and we suggest that an
emphasis on such distinctions may stymie further debate.
Bibliometrics rests on the assumption that authors cite the most
appropriate available references, that their literature review is
exhaustive, and that chosen citations are objectively valid for the
purpose intended. Beyond this assumption, ‘‘authors are free to do
whatever they need to the earlier literature to render it as helpful
as possible for their own arguments’’ [61]. Citation analysis does
not carry any positive or negative polarity, and should not be taken
to provide a measure of the quality of a given work. What is
actually being tracked is indirect influence, along with a work’s
visibility or acceptance among a described community. This is
invaluable to the descriptive analysis of the role of terminology in
shaping the dissemination and structure of new research fields
[62]. Indeed, in tracing the network of research that has shaped
neuroethics, we have found threads weaving together from diverse
literatures in sociology, anthropology, cognitive psychology,
behavioural psychology, marketing, law, and others. Lest we
claim to have rediscovered what was not lost, we note that these
links often originate in deliberate attempts by researchers working
to unite the disciplines. Here, we aim to contextualize these
individual links by providing a broader picture of the cross-
disciplinary locus of neuroimaging research and the academic
discourses surrounding its ethical, legal, and social implications.
Safire’s call for commonly defined terms to galvanize the
development of neuroethics [31] has been only partially heeded –
discussion of neuroethics issues is often not referred to as such.
Following Seixas and Basto [43] we therefore investigated
overlapping ethics and fMRI content, and found that this
landscape reflected a wide variety of concerns discussed in the
eponymous neuroethics literature, ranging from clinical practice to
philosophical enquiry. In fluid and diverse fields, using biblio-
metric analysis can thus support the spread of research, concepts,
and methodologies and reduce the degree of repetition and
redundancy. Here, we suggest better dissemination of neuroethics
literature and terminology, and the related and overlapping work
that lies outside this terminological terrain, to help galvanize
ethical discussion among fMRI researchers. Ethics means many
different things to many different people, and citation analysis
serves as a reminder that research is driven by a focus on
substantive questions that cross disciplinary boundaries.
Through mapping citation patterns we have presented the most
complete picture yet of the extension of ethics into published fMRI
research, and the locus of fMRI in ethical, legal, and social
commentary. We conclude by emphasizing the benefit of devoting
at least some space in fMRI research articles to specific research
ethics questions, and to discussion of the wider meaning, concrete
implications, and conceptual underpinnings of neuroimaging
findings. Situating such discussion in the context in which it is
originally reported [63] has the potential to improve the
dissemination and prominence of ethical discussion surrounding
this potent technology, to ground debate about the nature and
reach of its real-world implications, and to challenge assumptions
of neutrality at every stage of the research process.
Supporting Information
Appendix S1
(DOC)
Author Contributions
Conceived and designed the experiments: AG HP ER JI. Performed the
experiments: AG HP. Analyzed the data: AG LW ER JI. Contributed
reagents/materials/analysis tools: AG LW ER. Wrote the paper: AG LW
ER JI.
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