In 1974, the United States passed the National Research Act. This Act presaged the creation of institutionalized ethical review in the US, and later, around the world. Despite the global proliferation of these regulations, and a shared dedication across natural and social sciences to ethical research, knowledge about research ethics regulations remains highly fragmented and country-specific. This has limited scholarly ability to understand ethical regulation as a global and transnational regulatory system, and to see its effects. To remedy this gap, we developed a novel dataset: the Research Ethics Governance (REG) dataset. This dataset catalogues national-level structures of ethical review worldwide, including their year of adoption, structure, and applicability to social science research. The dataset will be relevant to scholars seeking to understand institutional diffusion and norm adoption, as well as those who seek to understand ethical review requirements, particularly for the social sciences.