Proceedings from the IV Brazilian Meeting on Research Integrity, Science and Publication Ethics (IV BRISPE)

report research involving human subjects, in accordance with its mission: to disseminate epidemiological knowledge applicable to surveillance, prevention and disease control relevant to Public Health. This report aims to describe the ethical considerations presented in the original articles published from 2014 (v. 23, n. 1) to 2016 (v. 25, n. 1). One hundred forty-seven original articles were published (10 issues), 8 were excluded because they did not report research involving human subjects. We checked for the description of the following items in the Methods section: Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) approval, date of approval, registry number, and informed consent. We reviewed 139 original articles. HREC approval was mentioned in 45/45 articles that reported use of primary data, 16/16 that reported use of secondary data from surveys, 30/62 that reported use of secondary data from health information systems, 12/13 that reported use of medical records, and 3/3 that reported studies conducted with both primary and secondary data. All 48 articles that reported studies with primary data described the HREC registry number, 34 mentioned obtaining of informed consent, and 7 provided the date of HREC approval. Among the 91 articles that reported studies conducted exclusively with secondary data, 51 included HREC approval, 55 provided the registry number, and 29 the date of HREC approval. Thus, all articles that reported studies