The new year starts with some encouraging news! British medical scientists call for stronger action against academic fraud. “Dishonesty is common and institutionalized in medicine and medical research“, said one of the participants in the conference. Importantly, the scientists want to classify the non-publication of negative results as a serious misconduct, next to plagiarism and data fabrication. In the US, the Office of Research Integrity has censured for misconduct the director (and co-author) of a researcher who committed plagiarism. Failure to act on suspected fraud is rightly considered an offense in its own right. In China, the president of Zhejiang University is leading a zero-tolerance policy against misconduct. The crackdown was partly motivated by the discovery of one Chinese journal editor that ‘31% of the 2,233 submissions over that time to her publication, the Journal of Zhejiang University — Science, contained unoriginal material‘. The bad news is that some of the research arguing for the health benefits of red wine has been discovered to be completely bogus. I bet they deliberately waited for the end of the holiday season to announce that!
Research Design Matters