Scientific misconduct
[5] In addition there are public health implications attached to the promotion of medical or other interventions based on false or fabricated research findings.
A 2003 study by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences found that 70% of articles in a random sample of publications about least-developed countries did not include a local research co-author.
Examples include the case of Gerald Schatten who co-authored with Hwang Woo-Suk, the case of Professor Geoffrey Chamberlain named as guest author of papers fabricated by Malcolm Pearce,[48] (Chamberlain was exonerated from collusion in Pearce's deception)[49] – and the coauthors with Jan Hendrik Schön at Bell Laboratories.
In many countries (with the notable exception of the United States) acquisition of funds on the basis of fraudulent data is not a legal offence and there is consequently no regulator to oversee investigations into alleged research misconduct.
Well publicised cases illustrate the potential role that senior academics in research institutions play in concealing scientific misconduct.
[55] This question is of great importance since much research suggests that it is very difficult for people to act or come forward when they see unacceptable behavior, unless they have help from their organizations.
This is recognised by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), which has issued clear guidelines[57] on the form (e.g. retraction) that concerns over the research record should take.
[58] The cases of Joachim Boldt and Yoshitaka Fujii[59] in anaesthesiology focussed attention on the role that journals play in perpetuating scientific fraud as well as how they can deal with it.
In the Boldt case, the editors-in-chief of 18 specialist journals (generally anesthesia and intensive care) made a joint statement regarding 88 published clinical trials conducted without Ethics Committee approval.
(The Taung Child, which should have been the death knell for the view that the human brain evolved first, was instead treated very critically because of its disagreement with the Piltdown Man evidence.)
In the case of Prof. Don Poldermans, the misconduct occurred in reports of trials of treatment to prevent death and myocardial infarction in patients undergoing operations.
[66] While that in itself was bad enough, the paper, presumably written as an attempt to save infants' lives, ironically was ultimately used as a defense by parents suspected in multiple deaths of their own children in cases of Münchausen syndrome by proxy.
The potentially severe consequences for individuals who are found to have engaged in misconduct also reflect on the institutions that host or employ them and also on the participants in any peer review process that has allowed the publication of questionable research.
[48] These negative consequences for exposers of misconduct have driven the development of whistle blowers charters – designed to protect those who raise concerns (for more details refer to retaliation (law)).
One tool developed in 2006 by researchers in Dr. Harold Garner's laboratory at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas is Déjà vu,[68] an open-access database containing several thousand instances of duplicate publication.
The creation of Déjà vu[69] and the subsequent classification of several hundred articles contained therein have ignited much discussion in the scientific community concerning issues such as ethical behavior, journal standards, and intellectual copyright.
Error analysis alone is typically not sufficient to prove that data have been falsified or fabricated, but it may provide the supporting evidence necessary to confirm suspicions of misconduct.
[73] In 1998 Andrew Wakefield published a fraudulent research paper in The Lancet claiming links between the MMR vaccine, autism, and inflammatory bowel disease.
In 2010, he was found guilty of dishonesty in his research and banned from medicine by the UK General Medical Council following an investigation by Brian Deer of the London Sunday Times.
[74] The claims in Wakefield's paper were widely reported,[75] leading to a sharp drop in vaccination rates in the UK and Ireland and outbreaks of mumps and measles.
In 2011 Diederik Stapel, a highly regarded Dutch social psychologist was discovered to have fabricated data in dozens of studies on human behaviour.
[78][79] In 2024, Eliezer Masliah, head of the Division of Neuroscience at the National Institute on Aging, was suspected of having manipulated and inappropriately reused images in over 100 scientific papers spanning several decades, including those that were used by the FDA to greenlight testing for the experimental drug prasinezumab as a treatment for Parkinson's.
