In recent years, the international scientific community has been rocked by a number of serious cases of research misconduct. In one of these, Woo Suk Hwang, a Korean stem cell researcher published two articles on research with ground-breaking results in Science in 2004 and 2005. Both articles were later revealed to be fakes. This paper provides an overview of what research misconduct is general...

einstein registered (in the last issue) its first retraction, due to a case of duplicate publication: " Neuromuscular electrical stimulation in critically ill patients in the intensive care unit: a systematic review " , by journal, like all peer-reviewed and indexed journals, asks authors to state unequivocally in their submission letter that the paper has not already been submitted to another ...

The paper by Bolland et al. in this issue had a longer “gestation” than usual at Neurology®; it was received on December 4, 2015. We usually review on a tight timeline and publish important work quickly. But this manuscript has a different focus as it presents a statistical analysis that demonstrates probable scientific misconduct (fraud) on a large scale. It is also unique in that its analysis...

BACKGROUND Today, with the rapid growth of scientific production, research misconduct has become a worldwide problem. This article is intended to introduce the successful experience on the management of research paper misconducts in the field of health research. METHODS Our aim was to design and develop the strategy for research misconduct policy. Focusing on the national regulatory system, w...

The apparent increase in research misconduct in the scientific literature has caused considerable alarm in both the biomedical (Benos et al., 2005; Smith, 2006) and psychological research communities (Stroebe et al., 2012). An understanding of research misconduct must be informed by the recognition that the norms of science might be quite general (e.g., Merton, 1942; Bronowski, 1965), ambiguous...

We hypothesized that scientific misconduct (data fabrication or falsification) is goal-directed behavior. This hypothesis predicts that papers retracted for misconduct: are targeted to journals with a high impact factor (IF); are written by authors with additional papers withdrawn for misconduct; diffuse responsibility across many (perhaps innocent) co-authors; and are retracted slower than pap...

Almost 2 years after Woo Suk Hwang and colleagues published groundbreaking work on the creation of human embryonic stem-cell lines, an investigation committee from Seoul National University, South Korea, announced that much of the research had been fabricated. Human embryos had not been cloned and stem-cell lines had not been derived from patient-specific somatic cells. Science retracted the tw...

Almost 2 years after Woo Suk Hwang and colleagues published groundbreaking work on the creation of human embryonic stem-cell lines, an investigation committee from Seoul National University, South Korea, announced that much of the research had been fabricated. Human embryos had not been cloned and stem-cell lines had not been derived from patient-specific somatic cells. Science retracted the tw...

Abandoning an earlier pretense that research misconduct is too rare to matter, the scientific community is trying to figure out how to minimize and police it. Could broadening the definition be the key?