WASHINGTON
(AP) — Fraud in scientific research, while still rare, is growing at a
troubling pace, a new study finds.
A review of retractions in medical and biological
peer-reviewed journals finds the percentage of studies withdrawn because of
fraud or suspected fraud has jumped substantially since the mid-1970s. In 1976,
there were fewer than 10 fraud retractions for every 1 million studies
published, compared with 96 retractions per million in 2007.
The study
authors aren't quite sure why this is happening. But they and outside experts
point to pressure to hit it big in science, both for funding and attention, and
to what seems to be a subtle increase in deception in overall society that
science may simply be mirroring.
Fraud in
life sciences research is still minuscule and committed by only a few dozen
scientific scofflaws. However, it causes big problems, said Arturo Casadevall,
a professor of microbiology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New
York. Casadevall is the lead author of the study which
looked at the reasons for 2,047 retractions among many millions of studies
published in journals and kept in a government database for medically focused
research.
Fraud was
the No. 1 cause of retractions, accounting for 43 percent of them. When fraud
was combined with other areas of misconduct, such as plagiarism, it explained
about 2 out of 3 retractions, the study found.
"Very
few people are doing it, but when they do it, they are doing it in areas that
are very important," Casadevall said. "And when these things come
out, society loses faith in science."
Prominent
retractions that Casadevall cited for fraud include a notorious British study
that wrongly linked childhood vaccines to autism, nine separate studies on highly
touted research at Duke University about cancer treatment, and work by a South
Korean cloning expert who later was convicted in court of embezzlement and
illegally buying human eggs for research.
Casadevall
said he was surprised because he didn't set out to study fraud. His plan was to
examine the most common avoidable errors that caused retractions. What he found
was that 889 of the more than 2,000 retractions were due to fraud or suspected
fraud.
While other
studies have shown a rise in retractions, no previous study has found
scientific misconduct as the leading cause, said Nicholas Steneck, director of
the research ethics program at the University of Michigan, who wasn't involved
in the Casadevall study. That shows a need for better, more honest reporting of
retractions by the science journals themselves, he said.
He and
others also said the findings suggest there may just be better detection of scientific
fraudoverall.
Most
"scientists out there are well meaning and honest people who are going to
be totally appalled by this," Casadevall said.
The study
was published online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, which had the second most retracted articles for all reasons, behind
only the journal Science.
The
publication with the most fraud-based retractions was the Journal of Biological
Chemistry. PNAS ranked fifth.
Casadevall
said that even if society as a whole has become more deceptive, "I used to
think that science was on a different plane. But I think science is like everybody
else and that we are susceptible to the same pressures."
In science,
he said, "there's a disproportionate reward system" so if a
researcher is published in certain prominent journals they are more likely to
get jobs and funding, so the temptations increase.
"Bigger
money makes for bigger reasons for fraud," said New York University
bioethicist Arthur Caplan. "More fame, more potential for profit... Some
of the cheating and fraud is not too dissimilar to the cheating and fraud we've
seen in banking."
Science
historian Marcel LaFollette, author of a book about science fraud
"Stealing into Print," said researchers can't prove that more people
are lying in general in society, but they get the distinct feeling it's
happening more. And in 2006 an Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that while
most people say they don't approve of lying, 65 percent of those questioned
said it is OK to lie in certain situations.
The world
has become accustomed to lying and forgives politicians when they do it in
relationships, LaFollette said. But it's different when it's a doctor,
scientist or an engineer because people can get hurt, she said.
Casadevall
and Caplan pointed to the 1998 study in Lancet by Andrew Wakefield temporarily
linking childhood vaccines to autism — a study later retracted because it was
found to be what another scientific journal called "an elaborate
fraud."
"Think
about the damage society took when mothers started to question vaccines,"
Casadevall said. "That's damage and it's still going on."
Reached at
home in Texas, Wakefield, who was banned from practicing medicine in his native Great Britain and whose claims are contrary to what
prevailing established medical research shows about vaccine and autism, said:
"There was no fraud and to use this and to use me as a poster child of
fraud really compounds that error."
Casadevall
said his work is about science trying to clean its own house. And because it's
about fraud, he said he did one extra thing with his study: He sent reviewers
not just a summary of their work, but all the data, "so they can check on
us."
___
Online:
The journal:
http://www.pnas.org
___
Seth
Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears
0 comments:
Post a Comment