More Than 63% of IEEE VIS Research Liable to be Retracted?! Ethics Approval Statements Protect Participants (and Researchers!)

2026-08-13

AI Summary

This study addresses the widespread omission of ethical approval and informed consent disclosures in IEEE VIS research, which undermines research reproducibility and jeopardizes the rights of both participants and researchers. Conducting the first large-scale systematic content analysis of 255 TVCG-published VIS papers, this work employs manual coding and quantitative analysis to reveal that only 3.2% of studies involving human participants fully reported both ethical approval and informed consent. The findings expose a critical lack of ethical transparency in the VIS community, underscoring the urgent need for standardized ethical reporting guidelines. By providing empirical evidence and foundational insights, this research offers a crucial basis for advancing ethical infrastructure within the discipline.

Abstract

We analyzed the ethics reporting in 255 IEEE VIS papers from 2024 and 2025, as published in TVCG. This analysis arose from our experience as readers and reviewers of IEEE VIS papers that such reporting is frequently incomplete or missing, as well as from investigations in which we ourselves had to answer challenges regarding ethics approval in our own work. Visualization research naturally often involves human participants, yet ethics approval and informed-consent procedures are not always explicitly reported. In our corpus, 189 papers (74.1%) reported on work involving human participants. Only 6 of them (3.2%) reported to have obtained ethics approval, an approval identifier, and having received informed consent from the participants, while 26 (13.8%) reported at least ethics approval and informed consent. These omissions do not imply that the empirical work was unethical or lacked approval. They rather show that current reporting practices make ethical approval difficult to assess. Beyond our alarming - yet true - paper title, we wish to raise awareness on how authors themselves may eventually be at risk for not properly reporting ethics. We argue that VIS should adopt clearer and more standardized ethics-reporting practices to protect participants, authors, reviewers, and editors.

Problem

• ethics approval
• informed consent
• research ethics
• visualization research
• ethical reporting

Innovation

• ethics reporting
• human participants
• informed consent
• research reproducibility
• scientific integrity