I think like most criminal or dishonest behavior, the occurrence of research misconduct is likely under reported. Any estimates on the prevalence of such behaviors are inherently biased, as we only have data on those who have been caught. As long as financial and professional advancement are tied to productivity, as it rightfully should to some degree, I think the temptation for misconduct will always be there. Harsher punishments for these behaviors may be one solution, as is continuing education focused on research ethics.

I think like most criminal or dishonest behavior, the occurrence of research misconduct is likely under reported. Any estimates on the prevalence of such behaviors are inherently biased, as we only have data on those who have been caught. As long as financial and professional advancement are tied to productivity, as it rightfully should to some degree, I think the temptation for misconduct will always be there. Harsher punishments for these behaviors may be one solution, as is continuing education focused on research ethics.

According to a Pubmed search, there's also some question whether these studies had IRB approval.

It sounds like statistical reviews of the papers could have/should have detected this misconduct much earlier, especially if the journals kept records of issues flagged on a per author basis. Perhaps the journals don't bother with statistical review or keeping/analyzing the patterm of peer review issues? We crunch the heck out of patterns of who buys what when for what reasons. Seems like more sophisticated statistical surveillance could go a long ways toward quicker apprehension and stronger deterence research misconduct.

I agree with Joseph Tkacz. The prevalence can be fairly high, and seems to vary by field (see Facelli et al. 2009 PLoS ONE: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0005738). I feel like a short course on publishing ethics should be mandatory for all graduate students. The consequences of getting caught cheating are usually quite severe, and of course every scientist bears responsibility for the public perception of our collective integrity. Here's a link to some material I used in a publishing ethics presentation to our group: http://edg.org.au/seminar1-ethics.html.

While a course on ethics would be good for students, it obviously wouldn't help in this case. There was no grey area that a course would have helped inform, the guy knew what he was up to.

I believe it is a misconduct of the researcher more than a research miss conduct. I agree with Alan Harrison: course(s) on ethics wouldn't help in this case and also with Joseph Tkacz: it is a dishonest behavior.

However, from the statistical point of view, something could already be detected when it was observed: "the results are all very consistent, all very much statistically Significant with very small standard deviation" and it was obtained with a small number of included patients. It is hard to achieve, with a small sample.

Obviously, an event like this is of concern to the scientific community.

All of these statements are great!! I also do not feel that increasing ethics training regarding research could have prevented this type of behavior; however the ethics courses and IRB credentialing necessary to conduct clinical research will curb the potential research error. All studies involving clinical research need to go through the IRB. When a researcher performs any clinical research without the knowledge of the IRB the research findings should be considered suspect of misconduct. I have heard some researchers complain of the labor involved in order to comply with the IRB, but I have always felt that the IRB is a great resource and can effectively promote research rather than hinder it.

Scientific journals should be more open to publishing studies that do not have "positive findings". I have always felt that the "negative" findings of a study is valuable information and can feed more information to the scientific community of those findings. This approach should curb unethical research methods that "fudge" the data in order to produce a "positive" and therefore publishable finding.

Replication studies are also another method of reinforcing the positive findings in research. Those studies will also add to the total sample size opening the door for metanalysis studies. The totality of this approach will also decrease the fudge factor in data analysis.

The strongest deterent for research ethical misconduct is to promote those studies that are not funded by private enterprise. The conflict of interest issue is much larger, I believe, than we realize. The truest research can be promoted by the absence of any conflicts of interest.

Rigorous statistical analysis and continual peer review should also curb misconduct. If the intent and passion behind the research is truly honets, then the implementation of each and all of these systems and suggestions should prevent most if not all research mis conduct.

Misconduct of any kind, scientific or otherwise, is a matter of grave concern and must be addressed adequately. A general sense of ethics and moral need to be ingrained and strengthened in our consciosness. Among most common drivers of misconduct are recognition and money. Our society need to become increasingly aware of it and should forge a strong partnership with the education system to teach and train our younger generation so that such an evil can be stemed or more suitabley it is nipped in the bud.

Dear Brijesh,

First of all, I would like to thank you for asking such an important question using the platform of Researchgate.

But I think it is more important to know the cause of this unethical practice of this research, before we wish to curb this global pandemic.

According to me, the real cause for this frauds are

1) Demands of Journals i.e. the data required by journals. 99% Journals are focusing and prefer articles with good data having high significance.

2) Guidelines enforced by the university to submit the report of research work(Dissertation/Theses) along with at least two to three publications with high impact factors. Until and unless, research personnel submit this, s/he will not be eligible to be awarded by degree for which s/he toils hard but silently in laboratory.

3) Supervisor/Team Leader who is not willing to accept that his/her proposed methodology could be wrong. It is not always necessary to get positive results. But supervisor/team leader always curse the junior researcher and said that it is all because of personal errors(improper handling without knowing the real cause). And this pressure(hidden infront of peers) is actually lead to provide fraudulent results.

4) Expectations of funding agencies. If someone received a grant for a research work proposed by his/her, then he/she has to provide good results after carrying out research work in accordance with proposal. Otherwise, the evaluators would not recommend the work as final(good output) for research grant. And that investigator will not be able to seek more funds from that agencies.

So I personally think that it is important to first solve these issues. And the moment, these raised issues will be solved, Science will be again science.

And to eradicate these problems from roots, only seniors can help. Because they are the decision makers.

Kindly share your thoughts!

Hi Rajeev,

Thanks for sharing the thoughts.

Good observations and comments. As pointed out by others, the prevalence of misconduct in research is probably much higher. While education is a good start and punitive measures might help, the basic link of benefits to the number of publications is often too strong compared to the loss, considering the chance of detection is low. In my own role at the university (professional affairs) I have noticed too many times co-authored papers where the co-authorship is given to people who had very little to do with the study, but has established a reputation for themselves. These people seldom come forward, as they benefit indirectly by having many more papers in their CV. Even with the journals requiring all authors to sign off on their contribution, often they routinely sign the forms without even reading it. The granting agencies may have a role in monitoring the studies they fund, but even this is fraught with difficulties, specially when their jurisdiction is not geographically limited.

The observation that some of the fraud could have been detected if more attention was paid to the statistical information is also quite valid, in my humble opinion.

Context in continuation to my previous post......

If you really came across with a fraudulent case which would not because of any of four cause mentioned above, Then that pseudo-researcher is actually shame for the scientific community. I believe that its better not to publish than to publish fake data, because in that case we are not only cheating science and society, but our ownselves.

Besides my primary research responsibilities, I am also an internal review editor for several high-impact peer-reviewed journals, primarily in oncology, here in the States and in Canada, Europe and AU/NZ so I will add my own perspective and some robust quantifications of the problem. Both "field experience" and formal systematic analyses confirm that we are now seeing, as noted here and elsewhere, an acceleration in article retraction in the sciences and more narrowing in the medical sciences.

The most recent and comprehensive study of retraction rates and phenomenon in scientific journals comes from Michael Grieneisen at UCD and Minghua Zhang (China) [PLoS One, 2012] and covering up to late Sept., 2011, using 42 scholarly bibliographic databases and publisher websites, including all major medical bibliographic databases. Only 22 journals from any field reached a level of 15 or more retractions within the 30 years from 1980–2010; stats prior to 1980 are immaterial, since only 21 retracted articles, total, were found from any field or source.

From among those journals with a high threshold of retraction, taken to be 15 or more retracted articles, in my own re-analysis I extract those with greater than 40 retractions per journal (btwn 1980 - 2010), finding the incidence leaders to be:

Acta E (Acta Crystallographica Section E)

Science

PNAS

Journal of Biological Chemistry

Gene Expression Patterns

Nature

I ran my own set of parallel contextual highly parameterized searches using PUBMED, Scirus, WoS (Web of Science), Terrko (University of Helsinki), and several selective leading bibliographical databases used in the PLoS ONE study, among others, for the post-2010 period to date and was able to confirm, going forward till the beginning of this year (2013) the basic trends identified in the study. [Note: for the leaders such as PUBMED and WoS, “retracted publication” in the Document Type field of PubMed or “retracted article” in the Title field of Web of Science, were used].

It is clear that despite the recent attention and sometimes hyberbolic discussions of scientific paper retractions, the authors are right to conclude, as I did also from my ad hoc update, that the proportion of published scholarly literature affected by retraction remains quite small, no more than roughly 4,500 in a thirty year period across all scholarly fields.

However, to be fair, the category of article retraction is inclusive of more than fraud, so it is germane to drill down on what the "sub-justifications" for Article Retraction were. Examining only those cases in which a formal "Notice of Retraction" was available, finds that alleged research misconduct was the motivation for retraction of 20% of these articles, while 42% were warranted due to questionable data or interpretations (which includes alleged fraud, as well as legitimate artifacts, and unexplained irreproducibility, or later forced re-interpretation of conclusions, and another 47% were warranted on grounds of publishing misconduct, primarily plagiarism and illicit duplicate publication. Although again the absolute counts are still modest, nonetheless these metrics for research misconduct (20%), issues of integrity including fraud (42%), and publishing misconduct (47%), most of these three categories pointing to underlying ethical concerns, is of grave concern, especially when one compares this to just a mere 9% incidence of publisher error, considered an innocent basis for retraction. (percentages do not tally to 100% since some retraction notices stated more than one justification for the retraction).

The problem is even more acute if we restrict our attention to the drug therapy arena, where 72% of retracted articles (2000 - 2011) were retracted for reasons classified as scientific misconduct (data fabrication, data falsification, questions of data veracity, unethical author conduct, and plagiarism), 44% of these in turn being for reasons classified as "unethical author conduct" and 33% for data fabrication specifically, compared to 28% retracted for error. These numbers show that a greater proportion of drug therapy articles are retracted for reasons of misconduct and fraud in comparison with other biomedical studies [Samp et al. Pharmacotherapy. 2012].

Two further problems are that:

(1) that 1 in 8 retracted articles could be readily found on various non-publisher websites, almost all of these copies containing no information of their retracted status, and

(2) scholarly bibliographic records often referred unwittingly to retracted papers, aggravated by decentralized web-based scientific literature access [Davis PM. J Med Libr Assoc. 2012].

Clearly this requires some automated notification protocol that can effectively identify and penetrate the many disseminated forms of journal article copies so that the findings of retracted articles are not, as they are now, propagated inadvertently into new research.

This is similar to the problem of continued use of misidentified cell lines such as the putative MDA-MB-435 triple negative breast cancer cell line now decisively known to be a melanoma, not a breast cancer, line at all. Yet despite having been added to the authoritative compilation, the Database of Cross-Contaminated or Misidentified Cell Lines, compiled by the International Cell Line Authentication Committee (ICLAC) / ATCC Standards Development Organization (ISO/ANSI certified), it was stunning to me to sleuth this list of 100+ cancer cell lines across virtually all major malignancies that are either cross-contaminated or misidentified, only to find that just within the last 18 months there were hundreds of studies continuing to use these rogue and now discredited cell lines (including prestigious papers of triple negative breast cancer using MDA-MB-435, published in several pre-eminent publications whose editorial and review staff should have known better (if already accepted for publication, I have proposed that these studies bear from the journal editors a special and prominent warning of use of cancer cells of discredited provenance) [Kaniklidis, C. The Boundaries and Limitations of Preclinical Research: A Mini-Review. (2013; publication pending: available from my ResearchGate Profile]. Consider these illicit cell lines as the preclinical artifact that is comparable to article retraction. So, we are now witnessing the parallel phenomenon of continued reference-as-authority of many retracted papers in the citations of new and existing research - clearly the notice of retraction status is not in and of itself sufficiently propagated, discoverable, and made known to stop further research contamination.

There are many reasons we can suggest for these observed phenomena, and they will in turn suggest a series of more robust regulatory practices whose implementation can both more effectively root out the likely high level of "iceberg"-like cases of ethical compromise in publication that are simply flying under the radar, while at the same time suggest standardized collaborative policies across journals and geographies that need to be adopted for Uniform Guidelines in Ethical Scientific Publishing. I will treat these themes in more detail in a pending posting.

Constantine Kaniklidis

Director of Medical Research,

No Surrender Breast Cancer Foundation (NSBCF)

European Association for Cancer Research (EACR)

Excellent thought provoking views Dr. Constantine Kaniklidis. I got to know so many new fraud cases and about other research misconduct. Even sir, I knew few case here in India who proudly publish duplicate and false publications. But as a junior and young researcher, I am not authorized to advise them that they are doing wrong and cheating science.

With the use of this question's platform, I wish to know how to check plagiarism in below cases:

1) Someone(let say X here) cut, copy and paste some content from an article in such a cunning way, that the present plagiarism checkers failed to catch them. This X's article haven't cited article from where they had taken the content.

If we had prepared any article(Let say Y here) using same references and used their content in an ethical way( i.e. no cut, copy and paste as well as citing them), and get our article published in a scholarly journal. What if after two years, somebody blame us that our Y article had plagiarized X's article. Is this be our misconduct and cheat or that of X one. and what to do in such cases.

2) Another case is, If someone(Let say XYZ here) had analyzed plant extract using either GC-MS, HPLC, HPTLC or other spectroscopic techniques and got the confirmation about few secondary metabolites present along with their structure. If XYZ prepared an article on Isolation and Characterization of Secondary Metabolites, without isolating them and given complete data i.e. UV, IR, 1H-NMR, 13C-NMR, Mass spectra(just by prediction or with reference to other articles based on those phytoconstituents). Then how to detect that particular article of XYZ is a fraud one......

Dr. Constantine, Please spare some time and clear my doubts.

Regards,

Rajeev K Singla

Hi Rajeev

I can answer for your first question.

first of all ...you should not miss that original article (from that "x" has copied contents) in your literature review.

even if by mistake, you didnt come across that original one but your research citing x is true. its not necessary to worry about those issues.

But sir, I wish to know the case when I had given citation to all the original articles, but not given to X because we haven't found X on any scholarly database. And Actually, it is X who did the plagiarism and cunningly taken content without giving credit to the originator(s). And somehow, X got its article published prior to that of ours. So will our article will be considered as plagiarised one. And if not, what should be the punishment for those pseudo-scientists other than their article retraction. Because, article retraction is not the significant solution.

Case Cenarios in Scientific Misconduct

Rajeev, and Venkatachalam:

I'll provide my analysis based on my acquaintance and experience with several authorities in this area of concern: the international bodies:

- ICMJE URM: International Committee of Medical Journal Editors Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts (referred to by me above)

- COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics)

- The Declaration of Helsinki

plus authorities in several countries with which I have dealings in this arena, namely:

- in the US, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI)

- in the UK, the UK Research Integrity Office (RIO)

- in Canada, the Tri-Council

- in Germany, the Committee of Inquiry on Allegations of Scientific Misconduct

(within Deutsche Forchungsgemeinschaft (DFG))

- in Europe, the European Science Foundation (ESF)

- in India, the Society for Scientific Values

- in China, the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) Declaration of Scientific Concepts

among some isolated others.

Case 1: Inadvertent use of a ethically contaminated article (X) in later research (Y).

There is no ethical taint applying to Y since (1) X did not in fact cite the source from which they pirated text, and (2) Y's use of the same sources as used by X was legitimate and without any instances of copying operations that would constitute plagiarism, so no ethical taint could legitimately apply to Y , (3) Y has constructive defense against a charge of pirating content from X since any overlap of content is due solely to the commonality of sources used, that is, that the similarity of Y and X in content is both superficial and accidental, necessitated by the need to use a common set of sources in articles within the same domain of interest.

This case is famous: the most notorious example was that of the distinguished lawyer and writer, Alan Dershowitz at Harvard, being charge in a book on Israel with purported plagiarism from an early book by the scholar and writer Joan Peters. He was wholly exonerated under precisely the principles I supplied here: quotations, citations, references and many phrases and fragments were found to be near-identical in both books, but on investigation this was clearly established to be consequent to the fact that Dershowitz had, perforce, to rely on the same authoritative historical documents that Peters had used early, so commonality of sources gave rise to the illusion, but not reality, of plagiarism by one author from an earlier one. Therefore, as also Venkatachalam Natarajan noted above, this is not a problematic case.

Case 2: Misrepresentation due to Failure to Perform / Omission of Protocol (isolation)

This is a more complex case, and you (Rajeev Singla) are correct that the leading commercial plagiarism detection tools commonly used in the medical sciences, namely:

- CrossCheck,

- iThenticate and

- eTBLAST,

among several others in the public domain, would be incapable of detecting scientific misconduct here. In such cases of Failure to Perform / Omission of Protocol , in the specific example you constructed, the omission of true isolation of the secondary metabolites and the omission of the complete associated data, with only analysis but not isolation technology and details provided, the only mechanism that could plausible intercept this is the journal review process itself. The journal's reviewers would have had to discern, and then demand proof of isolation via mass spectrometric or equivalent tools, and demand as well that the appropriate Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigation (MIBBI) checklist(s) - there are dozens, each for a different domain of application dependent on the type of experiment or trial being reported - be supplied by the author, as specified by the BioSharing collaborative initiative (biosharing.org) and widely used and committed to as a standard by medical journals and medical science publications advisory and /or regulatory bodies, especially in the US, UK and the EU.

The final issue is that of punitive action, if any: that is, what should be the professional penalty for manifest plagiarism? The subsidiary question here is, is retraction enough, when that typically means, today, solely, either:

(1) a Notice of Retraction

OR

(2) a Notice of Concern

You may be right that this seems inadequate for the offense, but I will take up this issue in a later posting where although I advocate some additional rigors in the process of punitive action, in many cases as I will explain, going further may encounter some complex issue of due process under law if the investigation was not absolutely dispositive of guilt, and what kind.

Constantine Kaniklidis

Director of Medical Research,

No Surrender Breast Cancer Foundation (NSBCF)

European Association for Cancer Research (EACR)

Thanks a lot Dr. Constantine. The idea of asking supplementary documents as that of spectra is good one.

Regards,

Rajeev K Singla

SERB-Young Scientist

From another advocate for identifying and improving practices to minimize misconduct in medical research, Dr Peter Wilmshurst, Consultant Cardiologist, Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and member of the Committee on Publication Ethics: (from "Dishonesty in Medical Research"

http://www.medico-legalsociety.org.uk/articles/dishonesty_in_medical_research.pdf

"... I believe that dishonesty is common in medical research. It is an international problem. One may do research in one country and publish the findings in a journal in another country. It obviously wastes resources and endangers patients. There is active concealment of dishonesty by some colleagues and passive tolerance by others. It seems clear to me that senior officials do not know what to do about it."...

Edvin Huff: That is interesting reading. Makes one wonder how serious the issue has become (and perhaps always was).. Some of us who have to deal with professional misconduct often hear stories but cannot prove, beyond reasonable doubt (!) to take any action. Unless those in the know, who may have evidence, come forward, things get swept under the rug.

Thank you Rama. I would hope that common reporting of conflicts of interest, while only a relatively small thing and which was only started less than twenty years ago, might have helped reduce some misconduct. Challenging topic.