The importance and need of more meta-research studies in medical ethics journals

ABSTRACT

Meta-research aims to research the process of research itself, and as such, it can be used to study threats to research integrity and potentially better understand them. This commentary assesses the prevalence of meta-research studies published in medical ethics journals to understand their representation. The retrieved articles were organized by meta-research area: methods, reporting, reproducibility, evaluation, and incentives. An analysis of articles published in the last two years in the 16 highest ranked medical ethics journals suggests that meta-research studies seemed to be not well represented in these journals. In this sample, less than 2% of the articles were classified as meta-research studies. Furthermore, some meta-research areas such as reproducibility and incentives are relatively unexplored currently in medical ethics journals. This commentary discusses the meaning of the specific meta-research areas and provides some examples of articles in medical research ethics that fit into each meta-research area. As a conclusion of this commentary, some action should be taken to encourage more meta-research publications in medical ethics journals for their potential to advance medical ethics science.

KEYWORDS:

• Medical ethics
• bioethics
• scientific misconduct
• conflict of interest
• biomedical ethics
• methods

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.