Fraud and Deception in Publication of Scientific Research: Is There a Solution? HERA's Policy Change

摘要

Recent well-publicized events in Norway and South Korea unpleasantly have re-focused the scientific community on the issue of whether, and by what means, we can ensure the continued integrity of our technical literature. In the Norwegian case (Pincock 2006; Sudho et al. 2005), regarding a publication in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, the primary author confessed to the complete fabrication of a clinical study investigating the influence of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs on oral cancer. Even more highly publicized was the recent case of W.S. Hwang, who reported the cloning of human embryos in a mainstay of the scientific publishing world, the journal Science (Hwang et al. 2004, 2005). The three articles had many co-authors, ranging from 13 in the Sudho et al. paper to more than 20 in the Hwang reports. Whether an instance of scientific fraud is conducted for financial gain or for professional glory, reports of such academic dishonesty are by no means new, nor are they limited to a single field of research. Medicine, physics, chemistry, physiology, anthropology, psychology and other disciplines all can claim a share of the bad news. Not surprisingly, the subject has even prompted at least a book or two (e.g., Wells and Farthing 2001; Judson 2004). Prominent historical examples, going back to Piltdown Man in the early-1900s (anthropology), include the Schon case at Bell Labs in 2001 (physics), the Darsee (Harvard) and Breuning (NIMH) cases involving biomedical research in the early to mid-1980s, and the Industrial Bio-Test case of the late-1970s (laboratory testing procedures).