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The ethics of research involving Aboriginal populations and low and middle-income country populations each developed out of a long history of exploitative research projects and partnerships. Commonalities and differences between the two fields have not yet been examined. This study undertook two independent literature searches for Aboriginal health research ethics and global health research ethics. Content analysis identified shared and differently emphasised ethical principles and concepts between the two fields. Shared ethical concepts like “benefit” and “capacity development” have been developed to guide collaborations in both Aboriginal health research and global health research. However, Aboriginal health research ethics gives much greater prominence to ethical principles that assist in decolonising research practice such as “self-determination”, “community-control”, and “community ownership”. The paper argues that global health research ethics would benefit from giving greater emphasis to these principles to guide research practice, while justice as approached in global health research ethics may inform Aboriginal health research practice. With increasing attention being drawn to the need to decolonise global health research, the lessons Aboriginal health research ethics can offer may be especially timely.

We thank Michelle Brear (2022) for her robust interrogation of our study's search strategy and present our reflections on the concerns raised by her commentary below. We also agree with Brear (2022) that greater use of the PRESS guidelines in ethics research could prove useful. Empirical ethics studies that consist of conducting a literature or scoping review and then thematically analysing included papers are being done more regularly of late. The Search StrategyWe developed two search strategies in 2018 working with a reference librarian at the University of Melbourne, one for the Aboriginal health research ethics (AHRE) literature and one for the global health research ethics literature (GHRE). We undertook two supplemental searches in 2020 to ensure that the same search terms were used under the parameters that largely corresponded with 'ethics' and 'strategies for combatting neo-colonialism' (i.e. search parameters 3 and 4 of the AHRE search strategy (Supplemental File 1) and search parameters 2 and 4 of the GHRE search strategy (Supplemental File 2)). We did so in response to reviewer comments that our study's finding that AHRE gives much greater prominence to decolonising principles and that GHRE explores justice in somewhat more depth was due to colonization terms not being included the GHRE search and justice terms not being included the AHRE search. This did not prove to be the case. When the search terms were aligned, our results were unchanged.