In what one sleuth called a “systemic failure,” a wildlife journal has issued corrections to a handful of papers not for an error in the articles but to include an item that wasn’t: ethics statements.
The most recent such correction in the European Journal of Wildlife Research (EJWR) was on September 8. According to the notice, authors of a March article on mammal diversity in Mexico provided additional information on the camera trapping method employed in the study — namely, that their research did not require approval from an animal ethics committee.
At least three other similar corrections have appeared in EJWR in the last four years, with several more articles with missing ethics statements flagged on PubPeer by commenter “Pseudotocinclus tietensis.” For example, for a 2021 paper on “understanding human controversies on the return of the wolf through the use of socio-cultural values,” which included a survey of nearly 1,500 people, Pseudotocinclus pointed out the ethics approval section for the paper says “Not applicable.”
The submission guidelines on the journal’s website state authors should include a section on “compliance with ethical standards” that includes informed consent and research involving humans or animals.
“Taken together, the pattern suggests a systemic failure at EJWR to enforce basic ethics policies, both through inadequate corrections for missing ethics declarations and through the publication of papers that lack any meaningful ethical oversight,” Pseudotocinclus told Retraction Watch when they emailed us to flag the issue. They have asked to remain anonymous because of past correspondence with one of the editors.
Jacqueline Frair, editor-in-chief of The Wildlife Society’s Journal of Wildlife Management, told us ethics and animal care statements “are an important component of scientific transparency, particularly in wildlife research where studies may involve animal capture, handling, monitoring or interaction with people and communities.” She declined to comment on whether the cases at EJWR indicate a systemic issue, given she is not familiar with the journal’s editorial history.
Jacco Flipsen, the vice president of life sciences at Springer Nature, which publishes the journal, told us he would “caution against drawing conclusions about the journal’s processes from a small number of unrelated cases.”
The journal issued its first correction addressing the missing ethics statements in May 2022, stating the authors “failed to include the complete ethical statement” for a paper on animals in a national park in Senegal. In addition to noting the authors took ethical considerations into account, the updated statement said: “It was confirmed by the Senegal Ministry of Health that no ethics approval was required.”
The second was for a 2020 paper on movements of goat herds in Mexico. The correction, published May 2024, states “it was not necessary to request permission from national research ethics committees since the vertebrate species studied is not regulated and not native to Mexico.”
The journal published the third correction in July 2025 for a study published earlier that year on human-wildlife conflicts in areas adjacent to a research center in Zimbabwe. The statement says the research was guided by ethical guidelines “which prioritized ethical treatment of participants, ensuring no physical or psychological harm” and noted no formal approval was needed.
Pseudotocinclus told us they flagged each of these papers to the journal directly before discovering the PubPeer platform in October 2023.
For a 2022 article about predator control by gamekeepers, Pseudotocinclus wrote the study “does not comply with normal standards of animal ethics, and was not ethically reviewed before the killing of animals was carried out for research.”
Flipsen told us the research in the publications “was conducted in different countries, under different regulatory and ethical frameworks.”
“Each case must therefore be assessed individually in light of its specific circumstances,” he said, and noted assessments of the papers were ongoing.
When we asked whether checking for ethics statements was a part of the editorial process, and how the papers were published without them, a representative for Springer Nature declined to comment.
Earlier this month, we wrote about the retraction of a PeerJ paper on tourists’ reactions to snakes for ethical oversight issues — the second snake retraction we’ve covered.
A paper on wildlife in Tanzania recently received a correction from EJWR for another reason: “Nelson Mandela” was “incorrectly” listed as a coauthor on a paper published the month prior rather than as the affiliate institution “Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology.”
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