In my July 11, 2005 post, Faked Research on the Rise, I mentioned the issue of academic medical researchers falsifying data and plagiarizing work in the medical literature. There were numerous cases of misconduct, plagiarism, falsifying research to win grants, falsifying data, including one doctor who actually went into patients charts and fraudulently added data to support the made up data in his article.

According to a study in the June 9, 2005 Nature 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 disturbing.

The blog, Browsing now directs our attention to a BMJ (Dec. 3, 2005) news article about the General Medical Council (GMC) suspending a doctor for false research claims. Ranjit Sinharay forged the signatures of two colleagues and falsely claimed authorship of research in which he had played no part and submitted to the Postgraduate Medical Journal. He was suspended for three months by the GMC last week.