Abstract
INTRODUCTION: The concept of professional ethics of academic educational leaders is an abstract concept for which several highly context-dependent definitions have been provided in the literature. The analysis of this concept is critical to reaching a shared understanding, developing behavioral standards, and designing evaluation measures at universities of medical sciences. METHODS: To explain the concept of professionalism among academic educational leaders, Walker and Avant's eight-stage concept analysis method was adopted. After an extensive review of resources, 37 articles were included and the antecedents, attributes, and consequences of the concept were extracted. RESULTS: An examination of the resources and concept analysis revealed that professionalism in academic educational leaders has three main attributes of care ethics, justice-oriented ethics, and ethics of criticism, and its formation depends on personal characteristics, professional capabilities, and having a systemic view. CONCLUSIONS: The identification of components and professional characteristics of professionalism among academic educational leaders provides a shared understanding of professionalism and is a basic step towards designing measures to evaluate this concept.