Q J Med 2003; 96: 243-244
© 2003 Association of Physicians
Editorial |
Fabrication, falsification and plagiarism
‘Many people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character’—Albert Einstein
The Office of Research Integrity of the USA (ORI) issued its annual report for 2001 at the end of last year. It is available on the Internet at [http://ori.dhhs.gov/html/publications/annual-reports.asp], and anyone interested in standards of scientific conduct, a category that should include practising physicians and biomedical researchers, will find it worth reading and thinking about. The title of this editorial comes from their definition of scientific misconduct: an action that represents fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, or other practices that seriously deviate from those commonly accepted within the scientific community for proposing, conducting or reporting research. Allegations of these misbehaviours are rising—ORI inquired into 38 new cases in 1998, 51 in 1999, and 59 in 2000—although whether this means that scientific misconduct is itself increasing is another matter.
We can all agree that scientific fraud is a bad thing, and that those who commit it are reprehensible. As Teitelbaum1 has pointed out, it is honest scientists who bear the cost. Time, energy and public money are wasted when researchers follow false leads. The victims of plagiarists are denied due credit, and every time a case of fraud hits the headlines, the reputation of scientists and scientific research takes a knock. In biomedical research, patients may even be harmed, if conclusions are drawn from fraudulent clinical studies.
So we can agree too, with the general principle that measures to reduce scientific fraud should be welcomed. What is less easy to agree on is what these measures should be. Some countries have responded in a similar way to the USA—by establishing a centralized agency with the legal power to investigate allegations of misconduct in research funded by public money—and the UK has been heavily criticized for not doing the same.2–4 Most such criticism, however, has come from editors of medical journals with high impact factors, rather than members of the research community. The latter may be more aware of the negative consequences for both science and themselves that can accompany investigations into fraud. It is worth noting that about 70% of the allegations made to ORI turn out, when investigated, to be honest differences in interpretations or judgements of data. Some charges of plagiarism prove to be disputes over authorship and allocation of credit between former collaborators. It is also far from clear that institutionalized systems designed to establish guilt and punish transgressors are effective in reducing the incidence of bad scientific behaviour.
The epidemiologist Geoffrey Rose spent a lot of his working life explaining how an individual's risk of developing disease depends on the way in which the population at large is exposed to the causes of that disease.5 Where levels of exposure follow a continuous distribution, which for the most part they do, the number of people with high levels of exposure is powerfully determined by the average level of exposure for the whole population. Thus the number of hypertensives can be predicted from the average blood pressure in the community, the number of alcohol abusers by how many drinks the average person consumes each week, and even the amount of violent crime by the level of aggression that the average person displays and is prepared to put up with in their everyday life. The unexceptional behaviour of the average person is what determines the extremes.
There may be a sharp dichotomy between a tiny minority of researchers prepared to commit fraud and the rest of the scientific community whose behaviour is invariably exemplary—a few bad eggs in an otherwise impeccably fresh basket. But it is surely far more likely that scientists vary in their possession of the qualities of honesty and integrity in the same way as they vary in, say, their levels of blood pressure. If so, Rose's argument applies: the everyday behaviour of researchers and what they are prepared to let pass in the behaviour of colleagues and collaborators sets a standard that influences the quantity of more extreme forms of dishonesty. Effective prevention of disease requires population-based measures as well as interventions that target high-risk individuals. In the same way, reducing scientific misconduct may require all scientists to change their behaviour, as well as the creation of mechanisms for investigating the extreme cases.
The QJM editorial office sees frequent examples of low-grade dishonesty and minor attempts to mislead in the manuscripts it deals with. Authors presenting a descriptive account of a retrospective case-series call their work a prospective observational study. Convenience samples are dubbed cohorts. References to earlier work are omitted to imply undeserved originality. Percentages are given to disguise the small number of observations. Controls are said to be matched, where a close reading of the paper reveals them to have been selected from colleagues working in the same laboratory. None of this would warrant referral to a central agency, even if one existed, but it suggests a culture not wholly inimical to deception and fraud.
As many recent examples have shown, current editorial and peer review processes fail to prevent fraudulent research getting into print, even in the most prestigious journals.6 Editors should perhaps be modest about the difference they hope to make. The QJM will try to encourage a climate in which fraud finds it harder to flourish, by insisting on unambiguous descriptions of methods, and by making it a condition of submission that the raw data on which a paper's conclusions are based be made available to our statistical advisors on request.
There is, of course, no sharp line between fraud and error. And since most of us are occasionally guilty of slipshod work, we ought to be chary of imputing base motives to those who make mistakes. A contributor to a recently published book on fraud and misconduct in biomedical research took a firmer line, reckoning that, for an experienced scientist, failure to search the global literature, not testing batches of reagents, not ensuring accuracy of the numerical analyses, or not reading proofs properly counted as dishonesty.7 Although his chapter was dotted with superscript numbers, the list of references at the end was missing. Judge for yourself if the publisher's erratum to the effect that the superscript reference numbers had been included by mistake rings true. You may think that it looks as if even those who fancy themselves as role models sometimes fudge things a bit.
References
1. [http://www.faseb.org/opar/news/docs/nr10x10x2b.pdf].
2. Smith R. The need for a national body for research misconduct. Br Med J 1998; 316:1686–7.
3. Rennie D, Gunsalus CK. Regulations on scientific misconduct: lessons from the US experience. In: Lock S, Wells F, Farthing M, eds. Fraud and Misconduct in Biomedical Research, 3rd edn. London, BMJ Books, 2001.
4. Lock S. Research misconduct 1974–1990: an imperfect history. In: Lock S, Wells F, Farthing M, eds. Fraud and Misconduct in Biomedical Research, 3rd edn. London, BMJ Books, 2001.
5. Rose G. Sick individuals and sick populations. Int J Epidemiol 1985; 14:32–8.
6. Adam D, Knight J. Publish and be damned ... Nature 2002; 419:772–6.[CrossRef][Medline]
7. Riis P. The concept of scientific dishonesty: ethics, value systems, and research. In: Lock S, Wells F, Farthing M, eds. Fraud and Misconduct in Biomedical Research, 3rd edn. London, BMJ Books, 2001.
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||