Sensitive topics of scientific research[Temas sensibles de la investigación científica]

The aim of this research is to analyse the different types of sensitive topics that can be observed in scientific approaches, to identify their causes, to explore their effects and to propose methods for their treatment. The most common typology distinguishes between subjects dealing with painful personal experiences, deviant behaviour, personalities, or entities with power, and sacred or taboo themes. A transposition of this grid to research approaches leads to a distinction between errors, frauds, manipulations, and scientific deconstructions. This exploratory research uses the case study method. It reveals that sensitive scientific topics are increasingly detected by Artificial Intelligence applications and made public by social networks. They have increasingly wide-ranging and lasting impacts on the careers and reputations of the researchers involved. These effects are more detrimental when the researchers are respected by the academic community. Among the types of issues observed, two involve ethical violations (fraud and manipulation) but two do not a priori violate scientific ethics (errors and deconstructions). The ethical criterion is therefore apparently not sufficient to characterise a sensitive subject, unlike the criterion of its negative effects on the reputations and/or behaviour of researchers, which turns out to be universal. Subjects are perceived as more sensitive if they raise radical, repressed questions and express doubts about the validity of dominant theories or the social conformity of behaviour. The most sensitive subjects' question – or deconstruct – concepts, heuristics, theories, or paradigms validated by the scientific community and anchored in a culture. This research contributes to the current reflection on scientific relativism that is spreading in all disciplines. It shows that « desensitisation » of a subject requires open debate between the parties concerned critical analyses of the subjects' perceptions and the search for greater « theoretical sensitivity ».