Re: Fraud in Science
- From: peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 8 Sep 2005 04:02:22 -0700
[please excuse me if this appears as a duplicate post - something
strange is going on with google that forwarded one post to my news
browser at once, but appeared to miss this one]
We've discussed the problem of fraud in science before, but the figures
given in this report from the Telegraph are rather alarming. It is good
to see that something is being done to try to address the problem, but
a pity that no money is to be made available for actual investigation.
"
Is the spirit of Piltdown man alive and well?
(Filed: 07/09/2005)
The celebrated hoax was thought to be a one-off but scientists are
still under pressure to break the rules, says Stephanie de Bono
Ever since the Piltdown man was shown to be a hoax about half a century
ago, science has been haunted by the spectre of fraud.
By and large, most researchers have felt themselves part of an
honourable tradition of being seekers after scientific objectivity. And
examples of trickery and deceit have been far and few between.
However, recent studies have shaken this view and challenged it as at
best complacent, at worst misleading. The major scientific crimes of
fabrication, falsification and plagiarism may be only the tip of the
iceberg and there is evidence of a much wider and deeper problem, not
of outright fabrication of results but of distortion, omission and
exaggeration.
This has become such a concern that a new body - the UK Panel for
Health and Biomedical Research Integrity - has been set up to advise on
the extent of malpractice, from minor to major, and how to tackle it.
"Most current published research findings are false," reports one
analysis of theoretical, clinical and molecular research in the online
journal Public Library of Science (PloS): Medicine last month. It began
with a study of 49 research articles that had been cited by other
scientists 1,000 times or more and revealed 14 of them -almost a third
- were later refuted by other work.
After modelling the source of error mathematically, the analysis
concluded that even a large, well-designed study with little bias has
only an 85 per cent chance of being right. An underpowered, poorly
performed drug trial with researcher bias has but a 17 per cent chance.
Overall, more than half of all published research is probably wrong.
Another recent survey from the journal Nature reported that up to one
third of several thousand National Institutes of Health scientists in
America were engaged in "questionable practices". As expected, when
falsifying data and plagiarism were present they were rare (0.3 per
cent and 1.4 per cent of scientists respectively). However, other
"minor" misdemeanours not previously investigated "are striking in
their breadth and prevalence".
By their own admission five per cent of respondents had published the
same results in two or more publications, six per cent had failed to
present data contradicting their own research, 10 per cent had given
inappropriate authorship credit, 15 per cent ignored data on the basis
of a gut feeling that it was wrong, and 15.5 per cent had changed the
design, methodology or results of a study in response to pressure from
a funding source.
"To the extent that the environmental circumstances of science are
similar here to what they are in the US, I would suspect that similar
issues of misbehaviour might exist in Britain," says Dr Brian Martinson
of the HealthPartners Research Foundation, Minnesota, and lead author.
In Britain there has been no equivalent study of scientific
misdemeanour. However, an increasing number of these cases have been
examined by the Committee on Publication Ethics' (Cope), which was set
up in 1997 for editors of science journals who were struggling to deal
with breaches in research and publication ethics.
The most common transgressions Cope has had to deal with are "lesser
ethical problems" such as duplicate publishing of results and failure
to disclose conflict of interest. But it has also dealt with rare but
florid cases of apparent fraud, including two that were recently
highlighted in the British Medical Journal.
"There is certainly more misconduct out there than was thought," says
Fiona Godlee, chair of Cope and editor of the BMJ. "Editors have a
responsibility to pursue allegations of fraud, but their resources and
remit are limited. The academic establishment in Britain has not taken
the problem seriously enough".
To meet these concerns, the UK Panel for Health and Biomedical Research
Integrity has been set up, backed for three years by the Medical
Research Council, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research
Council and Department of Health. The project, an experiment to see
what can be done to keep scientists on the straight and narrow, has
been spearheaded by Professor Mike Farthing, Principal of St George's
Medical School, London, and founder of Cope. Although the panel stops
short of actually carrying out investigative work, it will support
institutes in tracking down and dealing with a spectrum of scientific
misbehaviours.
With up to a third of researchers admitting they routinely commit
scientific sins, it is important for the new panel to understand how
the current scientific environment fosters and permits misbehaviour, so
that it can halt future outbreaks. Some of the factors are already
known. Burdens on modern scientists include fierce competition for
scarce resources.
Precious funding for salaries, laboratory space and equipment must be
fought for. And, as ever, there is the pressure to publish or be
damned.
Scientists are being pressurised to tailor their output to that primary
performance indicator, and gauge of scientific success, the number of
publications weighted by the impact factor - perceived importance - of
the journals they publish in. This fosters behaviour such as deriving
tenuous links to human disease, salami- slicing of results, spreading
them over as many papers as possible, and including authors who
contributed little to the research.
"It has become the aim of most scientists to get high up in these
evaluations," says Dr Peter Lawrence, group leader at the Medical
Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, editor of the journal
Development for 30 years, and past editorial board member of Cell and
EMBO Journal.
Scientists are therefore "strongly tempted to oversell their work".
"Most PIs [principal investigators] now spend much time networking with
editors, not at the bench, and it is they who spend their remaining
energy hotting up their students' work for publication, without
necessarily having much detailed idea of the work itself, making it
easier for them to give it more spin than is justified."
The desperation to flog a paper to the top ranking journals means that
scientists bend over backwards to manipulate manuscripts and satisfy
reviewers' demands, whether justified or not. In turn, the selective
reporting of only the most significant and glamorous findings in the
medical literature is a major cause of the larger number of reported
false results.
"While currently there is unilateral emphasis on "first" discoveries,
there should be as much emphasis on replication of discoveries," says
PloS study author John Ioannidis of Tufts University School of Medicine
in Massachusetts. However, this is easier said than done, as funding
and publication are much more likely to succeed if a discovery is novel
or groundbreaking rather than replicative: who wants to come second,
after all?
The Royal Society is also preparing to comment on the process of peer
review and issues such as conflict of research interests and
appropriate authorship in its Report on Best Practice in Communicating
Research Results to the Public. The initiative was launched in 2003, in
the wake of public concern with inconsistent research reports on issues
such as the MMR vaccine and GM crops.
"The consequences of biomedical research are much more immediate for
the general public," says Bob Ward, spokesman for the Royal Society.
"We need to ensure that there are proper safeguards and commercial
interest never overrides the public interest."
The report is expected to examine ways in which the peer review process
might be improved, as well as whether there are alternatives to peer
review for checking the quality of research results. It will be
published later this year.
However, there are doubts whether new committees and hand-wringing
reports will be enough to stop scientists spinning their results for
reasons of public relations or sponsorship.
"I am not convinced that increasing regulations will help," says Dr
Lawrence. "We need a gentle revolution in the way in which scientists
are evaluated."
"
.
- References:
- Fraud in Science
- From: peter
- Fraud in Science
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