Scientific Misconduct and Medical Journals

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, “Research misconduct means fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results.”¹ Other important irregularities involving the biomedical research process include, but are not limited to, ethical issues (eg, failure to obtain informed consent, failure to obtain appropriate approval from an institutional review board, and mistreatment of research participants), issues involving authorship responsibilities and disputes, duplicate publication, and failure to report conflicts of interest. When authors are found to have been involved with research misconduct or other serious irregularities involving articles that have been published in scientific journals, editors have a responsibility to ensure the accuracy and integrity of the scientific record.^2,3

Although not much is known about the prevalence of scientific misconduct, several studies with limited methods have estimated that the prevalence of scientists who have been involved in scientific misconduct ranges from 1% to 2%.^4–6 During the last 5 years, JAMA and the JAMA Network journals have published 12 notices of Retraction about 15 articles (including recent Retractions of 6 articles by the same author)⁷ and 6 notices of Expression of Concern about 9 articles. These notices were published primarily because the original studies were found to involve fabrication or falsification of data that invalidated the research and the published articles; in some cases, postpublication investigations could not provide evidence that the original research was valid. Since 2015, JAMA and the JAMA Network journals also have retracted and replaced 12 articles for instances of inadvertent pervasive error resulting from incorrect data coding or incorrect analyses and without evidence of research misconduct.⁸ During the same period, 1021 correction notices have been published in these journals. The JAMA Network policies regarding corrections and retraction with replacement have been published previously.^8,9 In this Editorial, the focus is on a more complex and challenging issue—scientific misconduct involving fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism in the reporting of research.¹