2011 Articles

Views and Experiences of IRBs concerning Research Integrity

Klitzman, Robert L.

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) can play vital roles in observing, monitoring, and responding to research integrity (RI) issues among researchers, yet many questions remain concerning whether, when, and in what ways these boards in fact adopt these roles. Increasingly, RI is being challenged due to many factors, yet the extent of violations, and institutional responses to these, remain unknown. As the amount and complexity of experiments on human participants, often funded by for-profit industry, mushrooms, scandals have occurred,1 posing dilemmas concerning how to best oversee research to protect these participants from harm.