Retractions up tenfold

I have seen this before: "Growth in research fraud as a result of greater pressure on researchers to publish...". How about research fraud as a result of dishonesty? Next, the editors' reasons for not retracting fraudulent papers: from "not having permission of authors, to being unsure about what retraction meant, to not knowing precisely what to do" (Harvey Marcovitch). How about dishonesty of the editors (the editors' fraud) as a reason for not retracting fraudulent papers? Are editors under pressure? What could be their pressure? I am still in shock after the Editor refused to retract a paper that has this abstract: "Outlines of cell borders on the basal side of cells in the imaginal discs of Drosophila larvae were studied after impregnation with silver. Disc-specific cell arrays were found in each type of disc studied. To determine if these patterns have morphogenetic significance, we compared normal antennal disc patterns with those of the Nasobemia mutant in which antennae are transformed into leg-like structures. The cell arrangement of mutant antenna discs resembles the one specific for leg discs but not antenna discs. We suggest that these cell arrays are under genetic influence, and are generated by specific patterns of cell division. Thus, they possess the characteristics of long sought after "pre-patterns" for morphogenesis." This abstract obviously steals the discoveries from another abstract (my PhD research; accepted but unpublished manuscript; two years earlier, the same journal): "Cell borders on the basal side of imaginal discs of Drosophila melanogaster were delineated after impregnation with silver. Leg discs differ from antennal discs in the kind of cell arrangement found. The arrangements in the antennal disc of the Nasobemia mutant (in which antennae are converted to leg-like structures) resemble those of leg discs rather than antenna discs. This finding suggests that the disc-specific cell arrays have morphogenetic significance, and may in fact create a "pre-pattern" for the development of appendages." Next, what was the reason behind the answer from the Committee on Publication Ethics (an organisation mentioned in the THE article; Chair: Liz Wager) to my complaint of the Editor's fraud, where the Committee said that plagiarism of unpublished article is not a plagiarism? I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW EXACTLY UNDER WHAT KIND OF PRESSURE the said Editor and the said Committee are acting. (See the documents at http://ca.geocities.com/uoftfraud/ )

The doctrine that all authors of a paper should take responsibility for it will be nonsense, until publishers stop relying on one communicating author to sign on behalf of all, and start seeking the explicit consent of each author. I once held a short-term research position, and subsequently found my name on a number of publications to which my work had contributed, but of which I was quite unaware. As it happens the papers were okay and I would happily have consented to publication, but it was quite a shock to find that articles could be published in my name without my knowledge or consent. Had they been substandard, I (and the publishers!) would have been in a very uncomfortable position.

My opinion is once an autrhor agrees his/her name to be included, then responsibility cannot be shirked.

How about a populist TV programme, where three or four researchers take it in turns to host a visit by the others, and lay on a presentation of the lab's work. Then, in the cab on the way home, each visitor is interviewed and asked to award marks out of ten for each of several criteria - originality, entertainment value, commercial potential. The results are aggregated over all the visits, and the winner receives a prize- a publication in a prestigious journal and the chance to appear on Dragon's Den. Obviously, the concept needs a bit of fettling, but you get the idea

I apologise for my mistake in my comment above: the two quoted abstracts changed places. I continue to wonder: why the statistical reports on research fraud are so popular with the media but the actual case presented by me is so unpopular that not a single word about it has been published? Frankly, the situation in the media is the same as it was with the dissidents in Soviet Russia: general proclamations of the need for publicity and the actual suppression of evidence. I have given here the reference to my correspondence with the Committee on Publication Ethics where the Committee, deemed by the media an authority on the ethics and integrity, has changed its own (and the one universally accepted) definition of plagiarism, excluding from it plagiarism of unpublished research. There is no doubt that plagiarism of unpublished research is the worst kind of it. My question is: will the media investigate this London-based Committee?

For the sciences it seems publishing has its facets clearly laid out but for the social sciences like marketing, I am afraid the "publish or perish" regime has made few inroads to a world that is more practical than academic, professional than intellectual and once published is considered dated. The statement I feel is redundant for marketing issues although economists have tried to formulate it but I perceive that humans by nature act differently in different parts of the world, so you can't say one size fits them all.

So: 95 out of 1,400,000 papers were retracted. (22 of which appear to have been by one person). Big deal.

Even worse than plagiarism is deliberate rigging of clinical trials and the unacknowledged misinformation in the medical doctrine it produces, to the great harm of unsuspecting patients. For an egregious collection of such deliberate frauds in research about premature babies that were knowingly published by prestigious medical journals and that are not retracted but keep getting covered up see retinopathyofprematurity.org/01summary.htm. Until the academic community has the courage to address such glaring research frauds all its unctuous pronouncements about "medical ethics" remain without any credibility and thereby discredit even honest research reports coming from this unreliable system. Respectfully submitted, Peter Aleff

OK so retractions have increased 10 fold in 20 years. How has the size of the academic population or the rate of publication changed in the same time-frame? Even then, as Berg has pointed out, it is a small number. Every discipline, every profession includes a % of incompetent or dishonest individuals.

i'm not a statistician but it's clearly nonsense to draw any general conclusions about pressures, dishonesty etc. on the basis of 95 in what? 1.4m! retract this story! now!

The above contains the following: " He added that there was evidence that people still frequently quoted papers after they had been retracted. "The system is not working as well as it could," he said." One interesting issue is that while it is unlikely that librarians or others would necessarily know about instances of retraction and go back and "flag" such articles in print collections in libraries, it should be possible to have a mechanism for noting on electronic versions of retracted articles that the article had been retracted, and the circumstances under which the article was retracted. Of course, this would require standards to be put in place for various online providers, etc.

Robert Sloan, there was at least one case when a paper was ordered to be flagged in printed journal. And electronic libraries are required to do so. The circumstances are described in the next issue of the journal together with the notice of retraction. The problem is that editors pretend no knowledge of the rules. Harvey Marcovitch is quoted in the article thus: Editors, he agreed, had been notoriously reluctant to retract, for reasons ranging from "not having permission of authors, to being unsure about what retraction meant, to not knowing precisely what to do". These reasons are pretexts.

It is self-evident that there are misanthropes, cheaters, liars, plagiarists, social and or professional climbers, profiteers of every stripe, go-along-to-get-alongers, etc. in all subsets of any general population. Given this reality, it would be helpful to educate people (and perhaps to re-educate each other) that the basic canons of scientific inquiry include complete transparency and thorough public communication (to other researchers, particularly) of all aspects of the research process as well as the need for replication of results as the way in which research conclusions begin the slog into acceptable and supported outcomes. This is not a rationale for accepting the current state of affairs, since ("after all") only a (putatively) small percentage of researchers cheat and ("after all") there is likely greater percentage cheating in other fields of human endeavor. (The latter is an empirically testable assumption of mine, of course.) It is, however, to be emphasized that scientific inquiry builds in correction over the long haul. In my view, one of the more powerful "causes" of scientific misconduct across the board is the "file drawer problem." This operates both as self-censorship ('I have failed the brilliance test by not having discovered what I said I would.') and by institutional censorship (editors, dissertation advisers, etc.). Keep your head down if you don't find something really sexy, new, and provocative. This belies a wide-ranging arrogance and misapplication of the canons of scientific inquiry that has no geographic or disciplinary boundaries. A second very influential factor, beyond the various “pressures” that several others have discussed, is the immediacy of public communication of results—to be first out of the box. We need to go back to basics: 1) as many undergraduate research methods instructors have said: Why do the research if I already know the answer? and 2) the need for replication before expounding is not obviated by the list of caveats.

Doing science is doing something that was never done before. And, science is not about invention, it's about discovering the laws of nature. The very small number of cases of fraud does not indicate yet the failure of science; these cases are just the tip of the iceberg. But, there is, as I would guess, some 90% of all work done which simply does not qualify as science. It is this 1,4 million of papers per year that makes me laugh. They were produced under pressure, you say? And they should be proven reproducible, you say? I think they should rather be clearly marked as chat and blogging under pressure, occasionally - with some fraud, occasionally - written by someone else, and occasionally - done by someone else. But always - approved by the peers who run a neighboring shop. Obviously, the whole system is under pressure and it depends on the absence of transparency.

Michael Pyshnov raises interesting issues concerning the status and role of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Membership of COPE is being openly advertised on some journal websites as if t is a mark of quality. Presumably some low quality publishers (of underground journals -see http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=407400), where academic integrity issues could more likely arise, can gain commerical or reputational advantage by being seen to be members of COPE. After all, COPE Members are expected to "strive to adhere to" what COPE descibes as its "gold-standard of best practice - its Code of Conduct. The problem is that it is not at all clear whether COPE actually attempts to enforce compliance by members with its Code. Has COPE ever denied membership or required a publisher/editor to resign? COPE clearly has conflicts of interest, since it receives quite high membership fees of up to £15,000 p.a. from the largest publishers. I do know of one UK-based publisher whose journals are members of COPE. Three cases of blatant plagiarism have been identified, reported and agreed by the publisher. In one case, despite complaints from the publisher of the original article, the plagiarised paper still stands. Even worse, in the other two cases, after complaints from the publishers of the original sources, retraction notices that were posted in the journal have been removed, along with the two articles concerned. Contrary to the COPE Code, the there is absolutely no record of the plagiarised papers ever having existed. Moreover, the plagiarising "author" claims that the publisher has offered him the opportunity to rewrite the offending articles. Could COPE possibly agree that "revise and resubmit" is an appropriate response to being caught as a plagiariser? By "burying" the case, this indefensible action by the publisher is enabling the plagiariser to be promoted to full professor. We shall have to wait and see whether COPE is an organisation with "teeth". Only if COPE disciplines errant members publicly, as other professional bodies do, will it be legitimately able to claim that it upholds publsihing ethics. Peter F Pope Associate Dean (Research) Lancaster University Management School p.pope@lancaster.ac.uk

COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics) does, indeed, hear complaints against its members who are alleged to have breached the COPE Code of Conduct. Reports of such complaints are made public. We have been in touch with Michael Pyshnov but were unable to respond to his complaint because it occurred many years before the journal in question became a COPE member (and, obviously, we cannot apply our codes retrospectively). Dr Pope raises the question of completing interests. While COPE does indeed receive membership fees from publishers it does not mean that we look more kindly on any misdemeanours. In fact, we are currently looking into a complaint that involves two major publishers and will publish the results shortly.

COPE is a toothless tiger!

Thank you very much, Dr. Pope. I completely agree that "Only if COPE disciplines errant members publicly, as other professional bodies do, will it be legitimately able to claim that it upholds publishing ethics." I believe that COPE represents financial and other interests of the publishing industry, playing a role of a trade union of the publishers and editors. They also added a fashionable feature - the power to investigate themselves in response to the complaints from the public. However, the outcome of their proceedings is obscured by anonymity, and, you don't even know the names of the judges. You know nothing before the questions are raised publicly and a public inquiry is launched. But it all depends on the academic media, of course - on the existence or the absence of the individual academics who can speak up. I remain in shock after receiving COPE's letters. For me, COPE was the very last office that could end my ordeal continuing now for 20 years and actually help me to restore my authorship of my PhD research. Previously, the university covered up the fraud of my former PhD supervisor, saying that she repeated and replicated my experiments and published a paper containing my research without acknowledging my authorship, but that this was not plagiarism. Then, the Editor of the journal, instead of reporting the results of his own investigation, said that he does not have "standing to challenge" the "legitimacy" of Canadian investigations and will not retract the article. It is fully documented, and admitted by the university, that the ideas for my PhD research were based on my previously published theoretical work. Had my former supervisor repeated and replicated my ideas as well? All that criminal nonsense was disregarded by the Editor, and now - by the COPE. What Liz Wager is writing in her comment here is NOT TRUE. She says that COPE was "unable to respond to his complaint because it occurred many years before the journal in question became a COPE member". In fact: 1) The plagiarised article was indeed published years ago, in 1989, but this was NOT the reason why COPE refused my case; COPE never said that this was the reason. There is no rule anywhere prohibiting retraction of older articles. 2) The stated reason for rejecting my case was this: "COPE cannot, and will not, become involved with ethical matters raised with any journal unless the journal’s Editor or Editor-in-Chief (as nominated by the publisher) was formally registered as a Member of COPE before the matter was raised. Our records indicate that Dr Reynolds was not registered as a Member of COPE until February 2009." Therefore, the reason was that my complaint to the Editor (not the time of the publication of the paper) was made on March 27, 2008, not "many years before the journal in question became a COPE member", as Liz Wager now says. 3) While giving me the above answer, COPE also said: "We must leave it to you to pursue the matter with the publisher and others." Naturally, I replied that if I pursue the matter now, I will expect that the Editor (being NOW a member of COPE) will follow the COPE Code of Conduct and I will expect COPE to watch his conduct. I agreed with the COPE in that they do not have to apply their Code retroactively, but I asked them to watch the present and future conduct of the Editor; so, the comment of Liz Wager here is misleading. There is no end to the COPE attempts to get out of this situation where they obviously HAVE to watch the Editor's present conduct. 4) The above answer to me was actually a second pretext. The first pretext for rejecting my case was that COPE, plain and simple, falsified the definition of plagiarism, excluding from it plagiarism of unpublished research. They later admitted: "We probably did make a mistake with our interpretation of the term ‘plagiarism’..." Finally, I believe that what COPE did with my case is an outrage, by the standards of their own Code of Conduct and by every standard requiring simple honesty. COPE cannot be judged by their Code; they make a mockery of it when they go to their confidential proceedings. The only possible way to restore the integrity of scientific publications is to give publicity to the individual cases. Yesterday, a new article appeared on the case of the university cover-up in Croatia that was earlier publicised in Britain - http://www.cmaj.ca/earlyreleases/28aug09_croatia.shtml This article affirms the right and the necessity of public disclosure. I am, again, asking for help from the public. I need the retraction of the fraudulent, plagiarised paper; please, see http://ca.geocities.com/uoftfraud/ On this site, the documents prior to 1996 are from the Affidavits given by the University of Toronto in the public court. If academics, after reading the documents, will feel the need to express their opinion, please, write to the academic journals and, of course, to the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Invertebrate Biology, Dr. Patrick D. Reynolds (preynold@hamilton.edu). He is the person who has the power and the responsibility to retract the plagiarised paper.

I agree. COPE is weak.

Can someone tell me if the retractions referred to are fully final published articles that have appeared in journals or are some of them articles that are made public but are not yet finalised and published as final?

Enjoy!