Allegations of fake research hit new high

[homeschoolmom]

<p>Oops–I somehow posted the link above before I typed my commentary</p>

<p>I was struck by this AP article in today’s papers.</p>

<p>Excerpts:</p>

<p>

On the night of his 12th wedding anniversary, Dr. Andrew Friedman was terrified.</p>

<p>This brilliant surgeon and researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School feared that he was about to lose everything - his career, his family, the life he’d built - because his boss was coming closer and closer to the truth:</p>

<p>For the past three years, Friedman had been faking - actually making up - data in some of the respected, peer-reviewed studies he had published in top medical journals.

</p>

<p>Lots of papers are running this story today–here’s a non-subscription site where you can read it.</p>

<p><a href=“http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apscience_story.asp?category=1501&slug=Fake%20Research[/url]”>http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apscience_story.asp?category=1501&slug=Fake%20Research&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>The article suggests that the handful of scientific fraud cases investigated by HHS (with their tiny staff and budget) are just the tip of the iceberg. </p>

<p>

Research suggests this is but a small fraction of all the incidents of fabrication, falsification and plagiarism. In a survey published June 9 in the journal Nature, about 1.5 percent of 3,247 researchers who responded admitted to falsification or plagiarism. (One in three admitted to some type of professional misbehavior.)

</p>

<p>I was reminded of deliciousgeek’s ethical dilemma (shared on this forum a few days ago: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=76866[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=76866&lt;/a&gt; )</p>

<p>Deliciousgeek is doing well to confront these issues now, in high school, and develop a moral compass that will hopefully keep him on the right course in the future.</p>

[homeschoolmom]

<p>Apologies for the duplicate thread I inadvertently set up elsewhere before posting my comments.</p>

[homeschoolmom]

<p>Here’s a link to the Nature article, which reports results of a survey involving over 3,000 scientific researchers.</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v435/n7043/full/435737a.html;jsessionid=230811CBDDF84EE1BFFB483A16CDE271#t1[/url]”>http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v435/n7043/full/435737a.html;jsessionid=230811CBDDF84EE1BFFB483A16CDE271#t1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>According to the table linked below, quite a few midcareer researchers report behavior like deliciousgeek’s within the last three years:</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v435/n7043/fig_tab/435737a_T1.html[/url]”>http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v435/n7043/fig_tab/435737a_T1.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>6.5% of midcareer researchers surveyed admitted that they had “failed to present data that contradicted their own previous research” within the last three years. </p>

<p>12% of midcarreer researchers said they had “inappropriately assigned authorship credit” within the last three years. (Presumably this means either omitting co-authors who should have been listed or listing co-authors who did not in fact contribute to the paper.)</p>

<p>14% of midcareer researchers said they had “dropped observations or datapoints from analyses based on a gut feeling that they were inaccurate” within the last three years.</p>

<p>The authors of the Nature article suggest reasons why their survey results may be <em>conservative</em> estimates that actually understate the amount of professional misbehavior among career scientific researchers.</p>

<p>The authors write:</p>

<p>

Historically, professionals and the public have focused on headline-grabbing cases of scientific misconduct, but we believe that researchers can no longer afford to ignore a wider range of questionable behaviour that threatens the integrity of science.</p>

<p>We surveyed several thousand early- and mid-career scientists, who are based in the United States and funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and asked them to report their own behaviours. Our findings reveal a range of questionable practices that are striking in their breadth and prevalence (Table 1). This is the first time such behaviours have been analysed quantitatively, so we cannot know whether the current situation has always been the case or whether the challenges of doing science today create new stresses. Nevertheless, our evidence suggests that mundane ‘regular’ misbehaviours present greater threats to the scientific enterprise than those caused by high-profile misconduct cases such as fraud.

</p>

<p>It is noteworthy that the scientists surveyed in the study were academic researchers working under NIH-funded grants. </p>

<p>One can also wonder about the many researchers working for pharmaceutical companies. (It’s interesting to note that a major pharmaceutical corporation hired Dr. Friedman as a director of medical research AFTER he’d been found guilty of large-scale scientific fraud and forced to give up his academic appointment at a medical school.)</p>

[wyogal]

<p>This is a major problem. As managing editor of a peer reviewed engineering journal, I get several allegations of this nature every year. They mostly fall into the plagiarism category and range from minor (insufficient citation of previous work) to astounding (wholesale translation of papers originally published in Russian, and presented as original work by a 3rd party to journals printed in English). Occasionally we have instances of graduate students or postdocs leaving one group, joining another in a second country, but taking (stealing) the research data with them. Absolute fabrication of data is more rare, although I suspect that if the perpetrators are clever they would not be detected.</p>

<p>Of major interest to me is this part:

David Wright, a Michigan State University professor who has researched why scientists cheat, said there are four basic reasons: some sort of mental disorder; foreign nationals who learned somewhat different scientific standards; inadequate mentoring; and, most commonly, tremendous and increasing professional pressure to publish studies.

The first reason given, I suppose, could apply to any kind of behavior and is unavoidable to some extent, but I suspect it accounts for a very small portion of the problem. The rest are all related to each other, in that if one is an honest, ethical person who has been taught the importance of accuracy in the scientific method and is working in a climate that supports that ethic, then none of these reasons are satisfactory excuses or explanations.</p>

<p>I have a continuing dialog going with the Dean of Engineering where I work regarding professional ethics and the school’s responsibility. While he admits that ethics education is important, he has yet to do anything about it. It should be required at both undergraduate and graduate level, and especially stressed for students from outside the US. The professors I work with don’t often address the honesty issue with students, they just take it for granted that their assistants know and understand the standards, and they don’t think it’s their job to provide mentoring on this subject.</p>

[deliciousgeek]

<p>Wow this thread and the article definitely hit home with me. I guess I didn’t realize that this kind of a thing was such a problem even at the university and professional level. I must say that although my issue has been a painful experinence for me, I am thankful for having learned this important lesson so early on, since, as in Dr. Friedman’s case, I think the consequences would be much graver later in life. I also agree with the previous poster that ethics issues need to be taught as soon as anyone begins engaging in research. I think, as in my case, much of this problem stems from a poor understanding of the standard real scientists must be held to</p>