Ethical positioning and interpersonal framing in pediatric neurocognitive research papers: a corpus-based discourse analysis

Although parental consent and ethics approval procedures have been widely discussed, ethical concerns about participant autonomy are frequently raised in pediatric neurocognitive research. How these practices are applied in research articles, from procedural reporting to interpretation, remains underexplored. Using a mixed-methods corpus-discourse approach, this study examines the framing and positioning of ethics in the Methodology, Results, and Discussion sections. Adopting a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approach, children’s voice, agency, researchers’ evaluation, and institutional authority are examined through corpus and concordance analyses. A corpus of 202,971 English words was compiled from 54 open-access clinical journal articles published in top-tier SCIE-indexed journals between 2010 and 2026. Findings reveal explicit procedural regulation in Methodology sections, implicit human-oriented framing and asymmetric agency and voice in Results sections, and increasingly abstract and evaluative ethical discourse in Discussion sections. These patterns highlight a gap between institutional ethical requirements and ethics in practice across article sections.