PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Philippe Charlier AU - Valérie Bridoux AU - Laurence Watier AU - Melissa Ménétrier AU - Geoffroy Lorin de la Grandmaison AU - Christian Hervé TI - Ethics requirements and impact factor AID - 10.1136/medethics-2011-100174 DP - 2012 Apr 01 TA - Journal of Medical Ethics PG - 253--255 VI - 38 IP - 4 4099 - http://jme.bmj.com/content/38/4/253.short 4100 - http://jme.bmj.com/content/38/4/253.full SO - J Med Ethics2012 Apr 01; 38 AB - Do all clinical research publications show strong application of ethics principles and respect for biomedical law? We examined, for the year 2009, the ethics requirements displayed on the website of 30 leading medical journals with an impact factor (IF) >10, and 30 others with an IF <10. We carried out a short study looking at the relationship between the IF of a journal and the ethics requirements in its instructions to authors. We show that the IF of a biomedical journal bears a direct relationship to its ethics requirements. Such results should improve the ethics requirements of all biomedical journals, especially those with low IF, so that they are internationally standardised to the higher standard required by journals with higher IF.