Phys.org April 30, 2024
An international team of researchers (Morocco, France, Australia, Sweden) presented an investigation of the ethics and legal aspects of 456 studies published France. They identified a wide range of issues with the stated research authorization and ethics of the published studies with respect to the Institutional Review Board and the approval presented. Among the studies investigated, 248 were conducted with the same ethics approval number, even though the subjects, samples, and countries of investigation were different. Thirty-nine did not even contain a reference to the ethics approval number while they presented research on human beings. They contacted the journals that published these articles. Since their investigation and reporting to journals, PLOS has issued expressions of concerns for several publications they analyzed. The team called for stricter control and cooperation in handling of these cases, including editorial requirement to upload ethical approval documents, guidelines from to address such ethical concerns, and transparent editorial policies and timelines to answer such concerns. All supplementary materials are available… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Journals involved in the 456 studies with legal authorization concerns. Credit: Research Integrity and Peer Review volume 8, Article number: 9 (2023)