Virology.ws Website Review

Earlier today, I sent the following e-mail to Dr Fiona Godlee, editorial director of BMJ. I cc’d Carol Monaghan MP, Darren Jones MP, and Nicky Morgan MP. I also cc’d Teresa Allen of the Health Research Authority. As you know, I have spent some time criticizing a 2011 BMJ Open study involving the use of school absence records to identify children with from ethical review on the false grounds that it was “service evaluation” rather than “research.” To support this claim, they cited an unrelated 2007 letter from the regional research ethics committee. The school absence study was conducted by investigators from the University of Bristol. As it turns out, members of this team of investigators have cited the same 2007 REC letter to exempt ten other studies (or parts of studies) from ethical review on similar grounds. Five of them, including the school absence study, were published in BMJ journals—two in BMJ Open, and three in Archives of Disease in Childhood. The first was published in 2009, with others following in 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2017. (I am cc-ing Carol Monaghan MP, Darren Jones MP, and Nicky Morgan MP. All three are involved in parliamentary inquiries into issues related None of these five BMJ papers appear to meet the criteria for “service evaluation” studies, which are generally designed solely to as*ess the provision of services through the use of anonymized databases. The BMJ Open school absence study, in contrast, featured a formal hypothesis, in-person collection of participant data, and generalizable conclusions. These are all hallmarks of “research” and not “service evaluation,” according to the UK Health Research Authority, the relevant government agency. Studies defined as Here are the five Bristol studies that cited the 2007 REC letter to exempt themselves from ethical review and were published in BMJ In 2007, the North Somerset and South Bristol REC approved a request to add questionnaires to those already being used during pediatric