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Yet another research worker has been shown to have falsified the results contained in many of their published papers. http://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.e2019 That this was yet ano
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Falsifying science
posted at 6/7/2012 1:11 PM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 2035
First: 12/3/2010 Last: 19/5/2013 |
Yet another research worker has been shown to have falsified the results contained in many of their published papers. http://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.e2019 That this was yet another researcher in anaesthesia-related subject should not be a cause for shame to anaesthetists but for pride, as it is not exclusive to anaesthesia, or even medicine. It’s just that anaesthesia, as so often before, is leading the way in developing scientific medicine. So if fraud is an endemic problem, it must be removed, and there have been several ways in which the fraudsters have been exposed. Some have had their results found impossible to replicate, leading to closer examination of their primary work. Some, like Joachim Boltd forgot to get ethical committee approval for their made-up studies, leading to closer inspection and discovery. Some have been so lazy as to use identical graphs, tables or illustrations in several papers, which some sharp-eyed and well-read academic noticed and questioned. But those can only be used after publication. It is clearly a responsibility of journals and the referees that carry out peer review to weed out and expose fraudulent papers, but they need some tools to use, and they are available. A little known statistical phenomenon is called Benson’s Law which Ben Goldacre has described in his Bad Science articles better than I could do. It is about the frequency of the first digit in a group of large numbers, and that a ‘1’ should be more common than a ‘2’, and so on. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/16/bad-science-dodgy-statsThe use of this method has been validated: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22695776 Other statistical methods are available, many developed in the banking industry to detect bad accounting as well as financial crime. http://videolectures.net/mmdss07_hand_stf/ But there must be a responsibility on the colleagues of authors, especially if they are invited to be co-authors to prevent such papers being submitted at all. Stories of professors who have their name above a paper who have never set foot in the relevant laboratory are legion. There is a case for them to take some credit for work done in their departments when a professor can be so busy with fund raising, committee and administrative work, but to be a joint author implies that the work was done under their supervision.. There is a need for “research governance” in any department that publishes, in which every member should be signed up to keep to accepted rules of scientific conduct, and to have their own work checked to see that it is so. Neville Goodman, another anaesthetist and researcher, proposed this eight years ago: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1079486/ The member of such a department with that role should change regularly, say every three years. That ‘governance’ role should be to inspect lab notes, equipment and results to detect and stop the struggling researcher before they actually stoop to fraud, if only to get the papers out that they are under so much pressure to produce. John |
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Re: Falsifying science
posted at 6/7/2012 3:11 PM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 143
First: 14/5/2012 Last: 11/5/2013 |
Oh please don't make it a criminal offense - the offenders will only get more sophisticated. Just give equal value to researchers and non-researchers. If you are a big boss in the training areas change the system do not pressurise your juniors to publish or perish; they might publish only to perish at later. Researchers publishing is just like any of us doing a job, we treat patients, they publish that is all. Assigning prestige just because someone published without assigning similar prestige to people who do a normal job is a culture in the medical profession which will begin to bite us more and more. When we use research posts as parking bays to mark time before someone gets a training post and then expect people to publish what is the quality that we can expect. We do not have surgeons doing one-off liver resections; why do we have surgeons/doctors doing one-off RCTs, one-off basic science research and one-off publications. John D - falsifying science may be a rare problem but false science is a much more commoner problem, only it goes often unidentified. |
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Re: Falsifying science
posted at 6/7/2012 11:24 PM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 2035
First: 12/3/2010 Last: 19/5/2013 |
Hemadri, It's NOT a rare problem! In the whole sceme of things, only a small number of papers are fraudulent, but the trouble is we don't know. Only now that doctors and scientists feel able to make this shame public is the size of the problem becoming apparent. I think you should make clear wht you mean by discriminating falsifying and false science in such a gnomic way! It may be that Benson's test will shortly become useless, just as drug testing has to continuously up its game in athletics. Some of the testing to be used in the Olympics is quite surprising and innovative! Falsifying science cannot be more than an offence, not a crime, or professional misconduct. After all, it's not a crime to sleep with your patient if they consent, but it'll get you struck off. John John |
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Re: Falsifying science
posted at 7/7/2012 11:37 AM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 958
First: 15/7/2011 Last: 15/5/2013 |
In Response to Re: Falsifying science: It's about time it became a criminal offence... Posted by skyesteve Skysteve, In the United States there are examples of medical professionals being prosecuted for ‘scientific misconduct’. Professor Eric Poehlman was the first Doctor jailed for publishing utterly fraudulent research alleging hormone replacement injections as a therapy for menopause when in fact it had no proven medical benefit at all. He had received federal money to fund research to the sum of $2.900 million dollars concerning 17 grant applications. He had also fabricated data in 10 of his papers. He was imprisoned. |
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Re: Falsifying science
posted at 7/7/2012 5:06 PM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 1280
First: 9/12/2011 Last: 14/5/2013 |
Good thing the judge and jury were not composed of Liberal Whiney-Hiney, Feel good Touchy-Feely Love everyone people, or this guy would have walked free. Acts of crime must be punished. DuaneF |
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Re: Falsifying science
posted at 7/7/2012 6:19 PM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 958
First: 15/7/2011 Last: 15/5/2013 |
In Response to Re: Falsifying science: Good thing the judge and jury were not composed of Liberal Whiney-Hiney, Feel good Touchy-Feely Love everyone people, or this guy would have walked free. Acts of crime must be punished. DuaneF Posted by DuaneF Just for the record Duane there was no jury. The Doctor pled guilty and the Judge sentenced him. |
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Re: Falsifying science
posted at 7/7/2012 6:49 PM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 958
First: 15/7/2011 Last: 15/5/2013 |
In Response to Re: Falsifying science: Hello Kirked: Just for the record. Nowadays, the prosecuted authors would make "retractions" or just "more or less huge" ........ "conflicts of interest disclosures". Sorry about that. Joey Posted by Joey Rio Hi Joey, the case I referred to above the prosecuted Doctor also had to retract his 'research' findings in addition to being prosecuted. You are correct. Different countries treat this problem differently. In some cases a retraction and loss of their job is the only thing done. It seems to depend on whether the country concerned has laws that govern such cases. |
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Re: Falsifying science
posted at 8/7/2012 8:38 AM BST
on bmj.com
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Posts: 43
First: 10/2/2010 Last: 5/11/2012 |
In Response to Re: Falsifying science: It's about time it became a criminal offence... Posted by skyesteve First, let's check if it is one already. Does anyone know how the laws on fraud in the UK apply to research? |
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