http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/324/7330/132/b
BMJ 2002;324:132 ( 19 January )
Caroline White London
Health science continues to be the area attracting the most complaints to
the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty, the committees' latest annual
report stated.
In 2000, 16 cases of alleged misconduct were submitted to the three
subcommittees (representing health and medicine; social sciences and
humanities; and natural, agricultural, veterinary, and technical science). Nine
of the 16 cases were submitted to the committee for health and medical science.
The organisation is a statutory body, presided over by a high court judge,
currently Hans Henrik Brydensholt.
Among the 16 cases, scientific dishonesty was not found in any of the three
completed complaints, two of which involved health and medical science. Five
complaints were dismissed, and nine were still pending at the time of
publication.
One of the complaints not upheld concerned comments made in a newspaper by a
senior researcher about someone else’s unpublished study results. The
researcher had obtained the trial protocol from the company sponsoring the
project. However, such behaviour was judged to have contravened good scientific
practice. The committees’ view was that prior publication of research in the
media before it had been properly evaluated was not good practice in general.
The other cases submitted to the health and medical science committee
predominantly involved alleged publication misconduct. These included alleged
unfair appraisal of an article intended for publication, wrongful use of data
in a published article, and an author being prevented from publishing by
coauthors. Others were over a contract dispute between a university and a
pharmaceutical company and media request for information. The media request was
subsequently referred to the Danish ombudsman.
The report highlighted the measures taken by the major US funding body, the
National Institutes of Health, to tackle research fraud. Researchers applying
for funding from that organisation have to prove they have completed a course
in good scientific practice before grants are awarded. The stipulation also
applies to non-US nationals wishing to obtain funding from the institutes.
Professor Michael Farthing, chairman of the committee on publication ethics
in the United Kingdom, agreed that this type of training should be mandatory in
Britain too and be the responsibility of employers. "It’s another form of
checks and balances, to ensure that senior people don’t get away with
murder," he said.
A meeting is expected within the next few months for all the relevant
stakeholders in the United Kingdom to establish a practical blueprint for the
establishment of an advisory body for research integrity.
A spokeswoman for the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty said that
there were relatively few cases of scientific dishonesty because Danish
universities took fraud very seriously. "If you are caught, the universities
in Denmark throw you out at once, and being such a small country, you can’t get
far enough away to start again without people knowing what you have done."
She added that Denmark was one of the first countries in the world to set up
a body specifically to tackle fraud and that this had been very active
producing guidelines. Moreover, all workers planning to undertake research had
to take a course in scientific fraud.
There were more reported cases in medicine and science than in other
disciplines because medical research was as big a field as all the other
disciplines put together, she added.
The report can be obtained from the Danish
Research Agency (tel 00 45 3544 6200). Its website is at www.forsk.dk
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