Blowing the WhistleÂ
Low rates of scientific misconduct could be attributed to the difficulty of reporting and investigating such allegations. Often, researchers may “self-retract†when they identify honest errors in their own research, or a reader or fellow researcher may contact a journal to allege misconduct. In other cases, issues of scientific misconduct may be raised within an institution where the researcher works, and then journals are contacted later.
“Journals have an obligation to try to look into every allegation they receive, whether or not they believe it to be true,†Dr. Kalichman said. “The problem with that ideal is that the journal’s office may be located in Washington, and the institution in Oregon, and it is unlikely they have the resources to investigate fully.â€
Some technological advances are making misconduct allegations less challenging to investigate though, Dr. Byrne said. For example, researchers at Harvard University are working with the scientific publisher Elsevier to develop technology that would detect manipulated or misused images – one of the most common types of misconduct.12 One study estimated that about 4 percent of published papers pulled from 40 scientific journals contained “problematic figures,†defined as figures that were inappropriately duplicated or altered.13 Additional papers from authors found to have used problematic figures were at an increased likelihood for also containing problematic images.
Other programs are designed to scan article text to detect plagiarism. Plagiarism is not always an exact copy of previously written text, though, so software programs search for word frequencies and distribution of text across the whole submission. “In particular, journals might look for papers that have a high degree of similarities, outside of things like confidence intervals,†Dr. Byrne said.
New programs also are recalculating statistical values to identify people who have rounded down p values to achieve statistical significance.
“Overall though, wide application of these programs could have huge downstream consequences, particularly in the short term,†Dr. Byrne admitted. “It creates a situation where, if a publisher uses this software and finds a large number of questionable articles, what does the publisher do with them? We can use technology to create a high-throughput screening system, but each queried paper then needs to be individually assessed, and that takes time.â€
Even if journals investigate every allegation of misconduct, “bad apples†will always be able to get through even the most stringent peer-review processes.
Dr. Resnik compared the situation to looking at a beautiful painting of a mountain. The artist may say that the mountain exists somewhere, but all a reviewer can do is tell whether the tree looks like a tree, or the mountain looks like a mountain.
“With peer-review, you are reviewing a summary, or a rendering, or what researchers say they did,†Dr. Resnik said. “They could have made it up.â€
“Blood is one of the most authoritative scientific journals in the biomedical field, and, for us, it is absolutely essential to publish what is right,†explained Blood Editor-in-Chief Bob Löwenberg, MD, PhD. As a peer-reviewed journal, though, “all we can do is look at the data and ask, ‘Are they consistent?’ These things are difficult to find when reviewers and editors receive a manuscript.†For more about how Blood prevents and handles scientific misconduct, see SIDEBAR 3.
Some editors argue that punishing individual scientists is outside of a journal’s jurisdiction. In a recent case of a retracted manuscript published in Nature Plants, Chief Editor Chris Surridge, PhD, defended the peer-reviewed journal’s role: “Decisions about publication of research are made on the basis of the research submitted and the peer reviews of that research. … It is not our role to investigate scientific misconduct or determine appropriate sanctions. … Our role is to ensure that the studies that are submitted to us and which are ultimately published are as accurate and reliable as possible irrespective of who the authors are.â€14
Regarding the same case, Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) secretary and interim treasurer Charon Pierson, PhD, noted that COPE does not support the practice of temporarily banning authors guilty of misconduct. “I would say that the only responsibility of the journal is to scrutinize manuscripts,†she said. “To deal with the scientists themselves – that’s the realm of the institutions, the laboratories, the funding agencies, the governments, all of those pieces of the puzzle.â€14
Dr. Byrne agreed, but added that one of the inherent problems with identifying misconduct is that if someone is knowingly doing something wrong, that person is going to cover his or her tracks. “True misconduct, such as data falsification or manipulation, can be hard to detect because it is hidden,†she said. “It’s often easier for peer reviewers to find honest mistakes.â€