ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
Vulnerability in research ethics: A call for assessing vulnerability and implementing protections.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Vulnerability in research ethics: A systematic review of policy guidelines and documents.PloS one · 2025Pooled it
- Interdisciplinary Representation in Research Ethics Committees: Implications for Nursing and Research Governance.Nursing & health sciences · 2026Article
- Personalizing Approaches in International Projects Engaging Individuals with Vulnerabilities: The Lessons Learned for a Person-Centered Research.Journal of personalized medicine · 2026Article
- Can anonymisation become disempowering? Rethinking ethics for low-risk global health research.Journal of global health · 2025Article
- Review
- Public attitudes towards social media field experiments.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Vulnerability in research ethics: A call for assessing vulnerability and implementing protections.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Ethics standards reference the need for special consideration of vulnerable populations, such as pregnant women, incarcerated individuals, and minors. The concept of vulnerability is poorly conceptualized in the medical sciences where it originated, and its application to the social sciences is even more challenging. Social science researchers may unwittingly fail to appreciate preexisting vulnerabilities and indeed may be responsible for inducing new research-related vulnerability. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive coding of country-level vulnerability designations. Specifically, we coded all 355 official documents governing social/behavioral human subjects research for the 107 countries with such regulations and identified 68 distinct vulnerability categories. The data reveal substantial regional variation, overemphasis of categories derived from medical sciences, neglect of critical categories such as displacement, and likely heterogeneity within and across groups. The article provides a conceptual framework that shifts the problem away from static, enumerated categories toward emphasis on research-induced vulnerability. Based on our conceptualization and coding, we present a framework for assessing vulnerability and implementing appropriate protections.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.