Hidden Empirical Research Ethics: A Review of Three Health Journals from 2005 through 2006

We hypothesized that a significant amount of empirical data pertinent to research ethics is currently inaccessible to research ethics committee or Institutuional Review Board (IRB) members for at least three reasons: It is published in non-ethics journals; articles are not adequately indexed using ethics-related keywords; and articles do not discuss the ethical significance of their data. We reviewed all articles from three health journals from January 2005 to December 2006, and identified 26 articles that contained data pertinent to research ethics. Only 7 articles contained keywords clearly related to research ethics; 15 of the articles contained no discussion of the ethical significance of their findings. Overall the articles we found constituted 2.2% of the research articles published in the three journals during the two-year period. If the same average number of articles were extrapolated to the top 100 of the approximately 5,000 journals indexed in MEDLINE, then at least 433 hidden ethics articles would be published each year. We conclude that better indexing of articles is needed, that IRB members and researchers need training to identify relevant data in the literature, and that IRB composition should include members from diverse disciplines familiar with ethics-relevant empirical data in their respective disciplines.