Informing research participants of research results: analysis of Canadian university based research ethics board policies
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
BACKGROUND: Despite potential benefits of the return of research results to research participants, the TriCouncil Policy Statement (TCPS), which reflects Canadian regulatory ethical requirements, does not require this. The policies of Canadian research ethics boards (REBs) are unknown. OBJECTIVES: To examine the policies of Canadian university based REBs regarding returning results to research participants, and to ascertain if the presence/absence of a policy may be influenced by REB member composition. DESIGN: Email survey of the coordinators of Canadian university based REBs to determine the presence/absence of a policy on return of research results to research participants both during an ongoing study and at conclusion. REB coordinators were asked to return a copy of the policy or guidelines and to describe the member composition of their REB. FINDINGS: Of 50 REBs that were contacted 34 (68%) responded and 22 (64.7%) met the inclusion criteria. Two (9.1%) had a policy that governed the return of research results while on a study, and seven (31.8%) following the completion of a study. Presence of an ethicist or a lawyer on the REB did not influence the presence/absence of such policies. No REBs had specific guidelines describing how participants should be informed of results. CONCLUSIONS: Most REBs did not require researchers to disclose study results to research participants either during or following a study. Thus this study identifies an ethical shortcoming in the conduct of human research in Canada. It has also demonstrated that there are no clear recommendations by REBs to facilitate the return of results to participants following research projects.
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 | 0.537 | 0.785 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.017 | 0.020 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.092 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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