Institutional Review Board (IRB)

An interdisciplinary institutional committee responsible for reviewing proposed and ongoing research projects to ensure that they are ethically sound and adhere to federal regulations regarding research experiments involving human subjects (see, human experimentation). IRB protocols should follow the basic guidelines of the Belmont Report. There are seven criteria that need to be satisfied in order for an IRB to approve a research proposal: 1) risks to subjects must be minimized; 2) risks to subjects must be reasonable in relation to anticipated benefits; 3) selection of subjects must be equitable; 4) enough information must be disclosed in order for participants to be able to give informed consent; 5) informed consent must be documented; 6) the research proposal must include provisions for monitoring safety of the participants; 7) privacy and confidentiality of participant information must be maintained appropriately. As part of informed consent in this context, research subjects must be informed that they can withdraw from the experiment or study at any time. For more on IRBs and the federal regulations governing them, see IRB Guidebook, published by Office of Human Research Protections and the HHS Training Module for the Protection of Human Research Subjects.

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