The Declaration of Helsinki on ethical principles for research involving human participants now includes a statement on scientific integrity and research misconduct.
Adopted in 1964 by the World Medical Association, the Declaration of Helsinki was conceived in response to the atrocities committed during World War 2 in the name of medical research on human subjects. The initial document – which has been updated many times over the last 60 years – included five key principles, including the primacy of informed consent, the need for a rigorous calculation of risks and benefits for a given study, and a consideration of the scientific value of a given study – that is, the experiment should be valuable to science and to the subjects involved.
In the recent process of revising the declaration, the World Medical Association added the following two sentences to the “general principles” section of the document:
Citing eLife’s unusual practice of publishing articles without accepting or rejecting them, Clarivate says it is re-evaluating the inclusion of the open-access biology journal in Web of Science, its influential database of abstracts and citations.
In contrast to the other journals recently placed on hold from indexing, including Elsevier’s Science of the Total Environment, Clarivate has cited a specific policy as the reason for re-evaluating eLife: “Coverage of journals/platforms in which publication is decoupled from validation by peer review.”
A Clarivate spokesperson described the policy as applying to “journals that do not make an editorial decision to accept or reject based on peer reviewers’ comments.”
A cancer researcher at the University of Cambridge in the UK has retracted a paper from Cell after commenters on PubPeer questioned aspects of 10 images in the article.
Steve Jackson
Though an institutional investigation found the figures were “not reliable,” another of the authors objected to the retraction as “an overreaction.”
Steve Jackson, the University of Cambridge biology professor and lab leader, previously retracted two papers – including one in Nature and one in Scienceposted on the same day – after a Cambridge investigation found a co-author, Abderrahmane Kaidi, had falsified data.
The sudden death of a 27-year-old woman in the Romania offices of MDPI, a major open-access publisher with a worldwide presence, has grabbed national headlines and raised questions about the conditions under which the firm’s employees work.
Local newsreports said the woman had initially fainted in MDPI’s Bucharest office on Friday, October 4, but that her superiors refused to call an ambulance or let her go home after she revived. She later collapsed again and died from a heart attack after efforts to resuscitate her failed, according to the reports.
But in an interview with Retraction Watch, a colleague of the deceased woman, identified as Maria Alexandra Anghel, contested the media’s account of events.
“At a time when scientists and scientific research are already being criticised by persons who identify science with technology and who deplore some of the consequences of technology, dishonesty among scientists causes unease among scientists themselves and regretful or gleeful misgivings among publicists who are critical of science.“
Daryl Chubin wrote that in 1985 — a time when institutions we now take for granted, like the U.S. Office of Research Integrity, did not yet exist. We asked him to reflect on what has happened in the intervening four decades.
The phrase “misconduct in research” today is a quaint reminder of how much science has been captured by for-profit, politicized, international interests. As a four-decades-removed social researcher of misconduct, I marvel at how an investigation industry has emerged to monitor, analyze, report and decry the mischief around us. This “watcher community” represents an industry in an era of science most of us never envisioned.
In the days before the Office of Research Integrity, many accused researchers and their academic institutions were grasping for an accountability structure that was fair to all parties — adhering to due process – and swift in its resolutions. Good luck! Today, the headlines in Retraction Watch reflect a publishing industry seemingly under siege—awash in retractions, plagiarism, AI mischief, undeclared conflicts of interest, whistleblowing, and a subset of ills that are dizzying and disconcerting to degrees never seen before.
Retraction Watch monitors an industry ever more self-conscious about misdeeds in research, from analysis to interpretation to reporting. By setting the threshold low, it focuses on misdeeds that may be rare in a particular field, but substantial when aggregated across fields. Yes, there is a risk of overgeneralizing from statistical anomalies, but readers care about violations that sully “their” field.
An Elsevier journal has retracted three papers for plagiarism after more than a year of inaction.
As we reported in August, the editor of the International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems in June 2023 promised to retract the articles, but they remained intact more than a year later.
Editors of a psychology journal have published a lengthy apology for failing to identify “biased” language and information in a paper about racial prejudice of Tibetan children against Han Chinese.
The authors listed affiliations with institutions in China, Australia, and Canada. The article describes experiments measuring the empathy – or lack thereof – Tibetan children expressed for characters with Tibetan or Han Chinese names who experienced either social or physical pain.
Optical and Quantum Electronics, a Springer Nature journal, has retracted more than 200 papers since the start of September, and continues issuing retraction notices en masse.
According to the notices, which have similar wording, the retractions come after the publisher identified problems with the articles including compromised peer review, inappropriate or irrelevant references, and nonsensical phrases, suggesting blind use of AI or machine-translation software.
“These investigations are based on intelligence from past work alongside whistleblower information,” Chris Graf, director of research integrity at Springer Nature in Oxford, UK, told Retraction Watch. But Graf declined to share the specifics of the inquiry: “We need to keep details of these investigations confidential to ensure that we do not inform the efforts of individuals who may engage in unethical activities.”
