An editor received a paper and requested details of ethical approval from the authors. The authors replied that they had approached the ethics committee about carrying out a more extensive study than the one submitted, for which ethical approval was denied or possibly thought unnecessary - the authors’ English isn’t clear in their responses. Before the start of the more extensive study, the authors planned a hypothesis generating study involving interviewing recently bereaved relatives. The authors approached the relatives’ family doctors to ask permission to interview them, and obtained consent from the relatives to do the interviews and view the medical records of the deceased. When almost at the end of the interviews they received the decision from the ethics committee that the more extensive study would not be granted approval. The authors were happy to refrain from their more extensive plans, and realised that the interviews they had carried out so far yielded interesting information anyway and would make a good research paper. They informed the ethics committee that they were not carrying out the original study, and they have not specifically received approval for the current study. The authors say that approval from the ethics committee was denied for a study that was not carried out.
- The editors need to find out the relationship between the two studies and also the reasons for the denial of ethical approval for the larger study. - The authors also need to convince the journal that the first study did not require ethical approval. - The editors should seek clarification from the authors and possibly also from the research ethics committee on the relationship between the two studies - The editors should also find out why ethics approval had been denied.