How journals can prevent, detect and respond to misconduct

Excerpt

Science journals form an important part of the research record; therefore their editors have a duty to safeguard the integrity of the material they publish. This is especially true in medical publications where unreliable research reports could harm patients. This problem was recently demonstrated in the case of Potti et al. They published a paper in Nature Medicine in 2006 [1] describing a technique for predicting patients’ responses to various chemotherapy agents. This technique was then used by other researchers to determine what type of chemotherapy cancer patients received in a clinical trial. However, while the trial was underway, a statistical analysis (by Baggerly et al.) indicated that Potti’s research was unreliable and the trial was stopped [2]. The Potti et al. publication was later retracted (after the work was shown to be fraudulent) but it probably resulted in patients receiving suboptimal treatments which may have reduced their chances of survival. Even more recently, the retraction of 88 papers by German anaesthetist Joachim Boldt, who had failed to obtain ethics committee approval for his research, and subsequent (on-going) investigations into other types of misconduct relating to his work, has raised concerns for patient safety which have been reported not only in medical journals but also newspapers [3, 4, 5]. …