THE REPORTING OF IRB REVIEW IN JOURNAL ARTICLES PRESENTING HIV RESEARCH CONDUCTED IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: We investigated how often journal articles reporting on human HIV research in four developing world countries mention any institutional review boards (IRBs) or research ethics committees (RECs), and what factors are involved. METHODS: We examined all such articles published in 2007 from India, Nigeria, Thailand and Uganda, and coded these for several ethical and other characteristics. RESULTS: Of 221 articles meeting inclusion criteria, 32.1% did not mention IRB approval. Mention of IRB approval was associated with: biomedical (versus psychosocial) research (P=0.001), more sponsor-country authors (P=0.003), sponsor-country corresponding author (P=0.047), mention of funding (P<0.001), particular host-country involved (P=0.002), journals having sponsor-country editors (P<0.001), and journal stated compliance with International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) guidelines (P=0.003). Logistic regression identified 3 significant factors: mention of funding, journal having sponsor-country editors and research being biomedical. CONCLUSIONS: One-third of articles still do not mention IRB approval. Mention varied by country, and was associated with biomedical research, and more sponsor country involvement. Recently, some journals have required mention of IRB approval, but allow authors to do so in cover letters to editors, not in the article itself. Instead, these data suggest, journals should require that articles document adherence to ethical standards.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.143 | 0.208 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it