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• Research fraud thrives in today's competitive science endeavour
  Joseph Y Ting
  Published on: 19 June 2015

• Published on: 19 June 2015

  Research fraud thrives in today's competitive science endeavour

  • Joseph Y Ting, Adjunct associate professor, School of Public Health and Social Work

  It does us all well to recognize that despite only a minority of scientists engaging in dishonest means to achieve academic gains, their disrepute will unfortunately taint the hard work of the honest majority. The greater harm will be loss of faith in publicly funded research and the waste of resources on non-credible work. Provided one evades detection, contemporary academia's unbridled publish or perish imperative breed...

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  It does us all well to recognize that despite only a minority of scientists engaging in dishonest means to achieve academic gains, their disrepute will unfortunately taint the hard work of the honest majority. The greater harm will be loss of faith in publicly funded research and the waste of resources on non-credible work. Provided one evades detection, contemporary academia's unbridled publish or perish imperative breeds and rewards ethical lapses, leading to an irreparable breach of trust.

  Deliberately misleading research could be unwittingly adopted into daily life and even be incorporated as detrimental advances in medical treatment, putting all of us at risk. The issue should be deemed to go beyond research misconduct to the material risk of harming people. This occurs by giving false hope, patients receiving non-beneficial treatment and forgoing therapies that do work, and incurring unnecessary side- effects. When standards are not adhered to, we depend on personal ethics and morals to avoid research misconduct. It is high time that all researchers were trained in ethical approaches to career advancement, preferably in their formative years.

  Science fetishes the published paper as the gold medal of prestige and achievement, more so if it is headline grabbing, hosted in a top journal and concentrates on a hot topic such as sex and race. The perverse academic promotion and incentive system that view high-profile journals as the pinnacle of success corrupt us by rewarding those who cut corners, or worse, cheat for a shot at glory. The pressure to publish or perish has become the sole currency of tenure, grants, prestige and promotion. The scientific endeavour is dysfunctional with cheating in scientific papers growing ever deeper roots. Recent headlines of misdemeanours suggest exaggeration, fraud and manipulation to enhance academic standing and competitive funding have only has gotten worse, or that we are better at detecting problems that would have gone unnoticed in the past.

  Falsified or erroneous results have forced authors and editors to retract papers from journals whose peer reviewers have failed to detect conclusion-altering biases and misrepresentations. In the same week that gay marriage was legalised by popular vote in Ireland, Science retracted a paper that purportedly showed gay political canvassers to be better at influencing conservative voters' views on same-sex marriage. Diederik Stapel's sensational findings that garbage-strewn train platforms made racial prejudice worse made for great press. The hope that cleaning up our environment could set free the better angel of our natures was dashed when a whistle blower revealed the social psychology experiments to have never taken place. Tilburg University defended him to the last, and Stapel continues to defend his actions as being driven by "a quest for aesthetics, for beauty-instead of the truth." Yoshiki Sasai, a senior author of a 2014 Nature paper that claimed to have developed an easy method to create multipurpose stem cells, was found hanging in his office stairwell. Vaccination rates tumbled and a rash of measles cases followed Andrew Wakefield's published contentions that thiomerisal vaccines could lead to autism. Wakefield is now in jail and deregistered as a medical practitioner. Authors submit fake peer reviews under assumed false identities, often ones they themselves have written in praise of their own work.

  The dog-eat-dog competition to be published in prestigious journals, weak oversight by supervisors or study monitors, the rush by journals to publish ground-breaking press-worthy studies, cursory appraisal by reviewers juggling the demands of their own wor, the secrecy and unavailability of original data for inspection all lead to sloppy or even unethical research. However, most researchers are honest to their calling, despite the career and competitive gains that become their due from disseminating their work in high profile journals. Of 2 million papers published each year, only a single paper a day is withdrawn from journals because of misconduct, ranging from plagiarism to fabrication of results. If we accept that only 2% of researchers commit deliberate or false misrepresentation, then 98% of the scientific research remains above board. However, the rare occurrence of fraud taints the whole scientific community, incurs loss of public trust on whom most funding depends, embeds erroneous findings in health care (resulting in patient harm), incurs the adoption of ineffective social policy and undermines future research underpinned by false premises.

  There are ways to minimise fraud, but it will require changing the process, from how scientists share their data to how their peers review it and who is allowed to enforce academic standards. Surveillance and regulatory oversight, such as that provided by Retraction Watch and Office of Research Integrity in the United States, police for fraud after it has occurred. Although sanctions, official reprimand and even jail serve as deterrents for potential offenders, could the problem be weeded out at an earlier stage, when a study manuscript is appraised by peer reviewers for suitability to be published? A journal's peer reviewers are supposed to detect errors, but they often do not have the critical data needed to check the findings, nor the time to do so, particularly since they are seldom paid.

  The scientific community clearly needs to build a better safety net, more so in biomedical research involving human subjects. Institutional review boards are only delegated to assess and approve a clinical trial protocol for participant safety and methodological validity, with no remit to monitor a researcher's adherence to safety standards during the conduct of the study. Although misrepresentation of findings leading to biased, exaggerated and fraudulent claims can be discerned by independent re- evaluation of full outcome data that are made available after publication of a clinical trial, this process does not protect a patient from harm and coercion for the duration they are enrolled in a clinical trial.

  I have previously advocated for the important role of data monitoring and safety committees in conferring protection to participants and detect fraud whilst the trial is in progress. With their in depth understanding of the study objectives and protocol, as well as access to fully disclosed results as they accumulate, these committees are well placed to gauge breaches in safety mechanisms, coercive recruitment and fraudulent behaviour from the start of a trial to its completion. Data monitoring committees are independent and widely perceived to be extremely competent. Using these committees to review and approve the completeness of outcomes reported before publication would also enhance the trustworthiness and credibility of clinical studies. The DAMOCLES Study Group recommends that data monitoring committees "ensure that trial results are published in an unbiased, correct and timely manner" and that the committee discusses final data and their interpretation with study investigators. The ability to monitor for errors, whether deliberate or not, while the study is being conducted improves the validity and credibility of submitted manuscripts, eliminates the need for resource intensive post-publication re-evaluation, and averts disseminating erroneous studies to journal audiences in the first place.

  Conflict of Interest:

  None declared

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  Conflict of Interest:
  None declared.

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