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Article History

Received: 16 July 2017

Accepted: 21 February 2018

First Online: 27 February 2018

Ethics approval and consent to participate

: The introductory text of the survey informed the participants that the survey was part of a scientific project and that the results were to be presented anonymously; participation was optional. Approval from the institutional review board or equivalent committee(s) was not obtained, as the online survey represented non-interventional research with anonymized data that did not include patients, but medical professionals and methodologists. There is no legal obligation to obtain ethics approval for this type of research in Germany; guidance provided by regional ethics committees (e.g. [CitationRef removed]) refers to interventional research. No informed consent was obtained from participants, as the survey was completely voluntary and anonymous, i.e. no personal data were collected. The survey assessors could not therefore draw any conclusions on the respondents. Although a list of the respondents’ IP addresses was available in the Survey Monkey analysis, it was not possible for the assessors to allocate these addresses to individual respondents.

: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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