Fertility Docs Said Their Study Didn’t Need Ethics Review. An Investigation Said They Were Wrong.

September 14, 2017

(Retraction Watch) – A journal is retracting a paper on the relative merits of one fertility procedure compared to another because the study never received ethical review or approval. In the paper, “Intracytoplasmic morphologically selected sperm injection versus conventional intracytoplasmic sperm injection: a randomized controlled trial,” originally published Aug. 27, 2015 in Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology, the authors wrote: “The Local Ethical Committee approval was not required because the procedure was commonly employed in the clinical practice.”