Research Misconduct: A Prevalent Issue in Scientific Publications, Slides of Public Health

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Publication ethics: an

embarrassing amount of

room for improvement

What I want to talk about

• Why research misconduct matters
• Britain’s most dramatic case of misconduct
• Other cases
• What is research misconduct?
• How common is it?
• Conflict of interest as a case study
• Why does misconduct happen?
• What does a country need to do to respond?
• A comment on COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics)
• An editor’s intray

Why research misconduct

matters

• It’s like child abuse: we didn’t recognise it, now we see a lot
• It undermines public trust in medical research and health workers
• It corrupts the scientific record and leads to false conclusions
• Most countries do not have good systems of either treatment or prevention

Britain’s most dramatic

case of fraud

August 1996: a major breakthrough

• Worldwide media coverage of

doctors in London reimplanting

an ectopic pregnancy and a

baby being born

• Doctors had been trying to do

this for a century. It was a huge

achievement

August 1996: a major breakthrough

• Achieved by Malcolm Pearce, a senior lecturer in at St George’s Hospital Medical School in London
• A world famous expert on ultrasonography in obstetrics
• A story from a paper in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gyneacology. Pearce was an assistant editor.
• A second author on the case report was Geoffrey Chamberlain, editor of the journal, president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, and professor and head of department at St George’s.
• The same issue contained a randomised controlled trial also by Malcolm Pearce & othersdocsity.com

Autumn 1996: both

papers are fraudulent

• A front page story in the Daily Mail exposed the two papers as fraudulent.
• It had a full length picture of Geoffrey Chamberlain saying that he hadn’t known that the work was fraudulent despite his name being on the paper.
• Chamberlain said it was common within medicine for people to have their name on papers when they hadn’t done much. docsity.com

What had happened?

• A young doctor at St George’s Hospital Medical School had raised questions about the two papers
• An investigation was promptly started and showed:
• The patient did not exist
• The patients supposedly in the randomised trial could not be found
• Among studies investigated back to 1989 - three others fraudulent, two of them in the BMJ.

The case of Peter Nixon,

cardiologist

• A television programme accused him of fraud. He sued for libel. His case collapsed.
• Rigged the results of a breathing test
• Had not written or even read papers published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine over his name

The case of Peter Nixon,

cardiologist

• Admitted errors could not be due to honest error
• In case control studies applied different tests to cases and controls
• Found “effort syndrome” in virtually all patients who consulted him with chronic fatigue syndrome--but failed to report that 55% of controls were also positive

John Anderton, former

registrar of the Royal College

of Physicians of Edinburgh

• In a drug trial forged consent of

17 patients who were never

given the drug

• Invented echocardiographs and

magnetic resonance images for

patients

Britain’s slowest case?

Britain’s slowest case?

• Anjan Banerjee and Tim Peters: paper in Gut 1990 on drug induced enteropathy in the and inflammatory bowel disease (Gut 1990--contained falsified data
• The same issue contained an abstract due to be presented at the British Society of Gastroenterology. Withdrawn but still published in Gut
• Both papers retracted in March 2001

Britain’s slowest case?

• Banerjee was awarded a Master of Surgery degree by the University of London for work that included the fraudulent work--still not retracted
• December 2000. Banerjee found guilty of serious professional misconduct for falsifying data and suspended
• September 2002. Banerjee found guilty of serious professional misconduct for financial fraud and struck off

Britain’s slowest case?

• March 2001. Tim Peters, the professor who supervised Banerjee, was found guilty of serious professional misconduct for failing to take action over the falsified research
• The GMC hearings were hampered by notebooks being “selectively shredded” by Kings,the medical school
• Authorities at Kings conducted an inquiry in 1991 but did not inform the GMC or Gut docsity.com

Does medicine

have a culture

that turns a

blind eye to

research

misconduct?

What is research

misconduct?

• The Americans have argued for

years over a definition

• The Europeans have tended to

take a broad view and not

attempt a specific, operational

definition

US Commission on Research Integrity (1996)

• Research misconduct is significant misbehaviour that improperly appropriates the intellectual property or contributions of others, that intentionally impedes the progress of research, or that risks corrupting the scientific record or compromising the integrity of scientific practices. Such behaviours are unethical and unacceptable in proposing, conducting, or reporting research, or in reviewing the proposals or research reports of others.docsity.com

Definition of research

misconduct proposed by a

British consensus panel

(1999)

• "Behaviour by a researcher,

intentional or not, that falls

short of good ethical and

scientific standards."

A preliminary taxonomy of

research misconduct (ranked

by seriousness) I

• Fabrication: invention of data or

cases

• Falsification: wilful distortion of

data

• Plagiarism: copying of ideas,

data or words without

attribution

• Failing to get consent from an

ethics committee for research docsity.com

A preliminary taxonomy of

research misconduct (ranked by

seriousness) II

• Not admitting that some data are missing
• Ignoring outliers without declaring it
• Not including data on side effects in a clinical trial
• Conducting research in humans without informed consent or without justifying why consent was not obtained from an ethics committee

A preliminary taxonomy of

research misconduct (ranked by

seriousness) III

• Publication of post hoc analyses without declaration that they were post hoc
• Gift authorship
• Not attributing other authors
• Redundant publication
• Not disclosing a conflict of interest

A preliminary taxonomy of

research misconduct (ranked by

seriousness) IV

• Not attempting to publish

completed research

• Failure to do an adequate

search of existing research

before beginning new research

What is fraud?

• We need a full taxonomy
• Better we need codes of good

research practice--and we now

have several

How common is fraud?

• Obviously depends on how fraud

is defined?

• How does serious fraud relate

to minor fraud?

• Are they quite separate?
• Does minor progress to serious?