Faked Research Results on Rise?
Associated Press
11:08 AM Jul. 10, 2005 PT

(brief excerpt)

"Allegations of misconduct by U.S. researchers reached record highs last year as the Department of Health and Human Services received 274 complaints -- 50 percent higher than 2003 and the most since 1989 when the federal government established a program to deal with scientific misconduct.
Chris Pascal, director of the federal Office of Research Integrity, said its 28 staffers and $7 million annual budget haven't kept pace with the allegations. The result: Only 23 cases were closed last year. Of those, eight individuals were found guilty of research misconduct. In the past 15 years, the office has confirmed about 185 cases of scientific misconduct."

This article is a startling look at the issue of academic medical researchers falsifying data and plagiarizing work in the medical literature. It mentions numerous cases of misconduct, including a doctor who actually went into patients charts and fraudulently added data to support the made up data in his article.

The doctor testified that he was "working 80 to 90 hours a week, seeing patients two days a week, doing surgery one day a week, supervising medical residents, serving on as many as 10 different committees at the hospital and the medical school and putting on national medical conferences. He did seek help, both from a psychiatrist, who counseled him to cut back, and from his boss, who demanded he increase his research and refused to reduce the patient load."

Interesting how is his own profession (his boss) whose reputation would also suffer from his improprieties ignored his pleas when he sought help.

According to the Wired article a study in the June 9 Nature indicates that the problem is still relatively small, "about 1.5 percent of 3,247 researchers who responded admitted to falsification or plagiarism." However, "one in three admitted to some type of professional misbehavior," which is very discouraging.

Even though the percentage of those who falsify information is relatively low, the fact is that these articles are still getting published and we are only able to catch a handful of them. It makes you seriously question and suspect all research and legitimate research can suffer as a result.

My question for the blog readers...
What happens to the bad research? I did a quick search on Medline for articles written by some the authors mentioned in the Wired article.

• Eric T. Poehlman made up research between 1992 and 2000 on issues like menopause, aging and hormone supplements to win millions of dollars in grant money from the federal government. ----I found over 139 articles.
• Ali A. Sultan, Harvard School of Public Health, had plagiarized text and figures, and falsified his data -substituting results from one type of malaria for another, now a faculty member at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. ----I found 22 articles. More if you use just A. Sultan (which he is also known to publish under).
• Gary M. Kammer, a Wake Forest University rheumatology professor and leading lupus expert, made up families and medical conditions in grant applications, has resigned from the university and has been suspended from receiving federal grants for three years. ---I found 71 articles.

Given the fact that the above authors have published over 200 articles, how do we know what articles had good information and what had false information? Is there any way of knowing in the literature or in the databases? Are the bad articles simply removed...if so what about all of the articles that cited these bad articles? What happens to them?