Failure to report ethical approval in child health research: Review of published papers

More than 500 journals have adopted the uniform requirements of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, which stipulate that authors should "indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation." One major purpose of institutional review is to ensure that informed consent is obtained when possible. We investigated how often research publications about child health report ethics committee approval or informed consent.