Article Text
Abstract
Fraud in medical publications is an increasing concern. In particular, disciplines related to perioperative medicine—including anaesthesia and critical care—currently hold the highest rankings in terms of retracted papers for research misconduct. The dominance of this dubious achievement is attributable to a limited number of researchers who have repeatedly committed scientific fraud. In the last three decades, six researchers have authored 421 of the 475 papers retracted in perioperative medicine. This narrative review reports on six cases of fabricated publication in perioperative medicine that resulted in the paper’s retraction. The process that led to the unveiling of the fraud, the impact on clinical practice, and changes in regulatory mechanisms of scientific companies and governmental agencies’ policies are also presented. Fraud in medical publications is a growing concern that affects perioperative medicine requiring a substantial number of papers to be retracted. The continuous control elicited by readers, by local institutional review boards, scientific journal reviewers, scientific societies and government agencies can play an important role in preserving the ‘pact of trust’ between authors, professionals and ultimately the relationship between doctors and patients.
- applied and professional ethics
- anaesthetics / anesthesiology
- clinical ethics
- education
- ethics
Data availability statement
There are no data in this work.
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Data availability statement
There are no data in this work.
Footnotes
Correction notice This article has been corrected since publication. Reader feedback post-publication identified factual inaccuracies in the cases described and typographical errors. The Editor-in-chief (EIC) has reviewed the article and associated references. The errors did not substantially affect the discussion section or conclusions of the article. The errors spotted by the reader, together with others identified by the EIC, have been amended. We thank the reader for bringing this to our attention and the authors for their cooperation. The errors appear to have arisen from difficulties understanding and writing in English. For further details on the correct text, please see supplemental file 1.
Contributors FB conceived of the presented idea. CGN and FB did the research and drafted the manuscript. LT and FB revised it. All authors listed contributed to the final manuscript.
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Supplemental material This content has been supplied by the author(s). It has not been vetted by BMJ Publishing Group Limited (BMJ) and may not have been peer-reviewed. Any opinions or recommendations discussed are solely those of the author(s) and are not endorsed by BMJ. BMJ disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on the content. Where the content includes any translated material, BMJ does not warrant the accuracy and reliability of the translations (including but not limited to local regulations, clinical guidelines, terminology, drug names and drug dosages), and is not responsible for any error and/or omissions arising from translation and adaptation or otherwise.
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- Boldt: the great pretender
- Should research fraud be a crime?
- Use of perioperative hydroxyethyl starch 6% and albumin 5% in elective joint arthroplasty and association with adverse outcomes: a retrospective population based analysis
- Retractions in the medical literature: how can patients be protected from risk?
- Exclusion of suspect data raises question mark over safety of common plasma substitute
- An investigation into the impact and implications of published papers from retracted research: systematic search of affected literature
- Using ‘nudge’ principles for order set design: a before and after evaluation of an electronic prescribing template in critical care
- Does retraction after misconduct have an impact on citations? A pre–post study
- Concerns over use of hydroxyethyl starch solutions
- Role of regional anesthesia and analgesia in enhanced recovery after colorectal surgery: a systematic review of randomized controlled trials