Research Integrity
The Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands has posted online a copy of the survey some of its researchers received.Credit: ShutterstockA growing number of researchers in Australia, Europe, the United Kingdom and Canada who receive US funding have been asked to declare their institution’s links to China and whether their projects comply with US government ideology. Associations representing universities in these regions say this threatens academic freedom and undermines scientific advancement.Several universities or university associations have confirmed to Nature that some of their staff or members were sent a detailed survey asking whether their US-funded projects relate to diversity,… […]
Acheter une revue, profiter de sa notoriété pour piéger les chercheurs naïfs et attirer les moins scrupuleux, augmenter les tarifs et le nombre de publications… Cette opération bien rodée est la dernière stratégie en vogue pour tirer un maximum de bénéfices du monde de la science, au détriment des règles éthiques et de la qualité de la recherche. La première alerte documentée de ce phénomène a été lancée par deux chercheurs de l’Université de Grenade (Espagne), qui ont récemment publié une longue enquête baptisée "L’invasion des voleurs de revues scientifiques".Michel Dubois, sociologue spécialiste d’intégrité scientifique, directeur de recherche au CNRS,… […]
Today, the scholarly publishing sector is undergoing its second digital transformation. The first digital transformation saw a massive shift from paper to digital, but otherwise publishing retained many of the structures, workflows, incentives, and outputs that characterized the print era. A variety of shared infrastructure was developed to serve the needs of this first digital transformation. In this current second digital transformation, many of the structures, workflows, incentives, and outputs that characterized the print era are being revamped in favor of new approaches that bring tremendous opportunities, and also non-trivial risks, to scholarly communication. The second digital transformation requires shared… […]
Vie des labos. L’Institut Dana-Farber, à Boston, l’un des principaux pôles américains de recherche en cancérologie, affilié à l’université Harvard, fait face à une crise majeure mettant en jeu sa réputation et sa crédibilité : il vient de demander la rétractation de six articles scientifiques, signés par certains de ses membres dirigeants, et des corrections pour des dizaines d’autres. Ces mesures interviennent après qu’un biologiste britannique, Sholto David, a décrit sur le site du chasseur de fraude allemand Leonid Schneider des manipulations d’images suspectes dans 58 études émanant de Dana-Farber. Cela aurait-il pu arriver si les revues qui ont publié les articles… […]
The French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) hosted two related plagiarism scandals in recent years. One concerned the serial plagiarism of one of its medieval philosophy researchers. The other concerned the attempted whitewashing of this plagiarism by a CNRS-appointed commission tasked with investigating the plagiarism charges. A recent editorial in the journal Theoria recounts these events and makes some recommendations. The author of the editorial is Sven Ove Hansson (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm). In the sections concerning the investigative commission, he first notes its self-described task: “To distinguish between plagiarisms properly so called, on the one hand, and, on the… […]
Alors que l’éthique de la recherche et l’intégrité scientifique sont fréquemment présentées comme deux des piliers sur lesquels repose la confiance du public à l’égard des sciences, il n’existait à ce jour en France aucune enquête permettant de décrire l’état des représentations de la communauté scientifique sur ces deux sujets. Parce qu’elle a contribué à exacerber les enjeux associés à l’intégrité scientifique, la pandémie de Covid-19 nous donne l’occasion de pallier cette absence avec le soutien de l’Agence nationale de la recherche. Ce rapport de recherche présente les principaux résultats d’une enquête par questionnaire adressé à un échantillon du personnel… […]
Depuis la Californie, l’ex-chercheuse et aujourd’hui détective en intégrité scientifique Elisabeth Bik scrute les publications et rappelle à l’ordre les chercheurs tentés par la fraude. TheMetaNews, le premier journal pro-chercheur, propose des offres d’abonnement aux établissements de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche [universités et organismes]. 15 établissements ont déjà souscrit : CEA | CNRS | Ecole des Ponts ParisTech | ENSSIB | Institut Pasteur | IFREMER | INSERM | La Rochelle Université | Sorbonne Université | Université Gustave Eiffel | Université de Guyane | Université Le Havre-Normandie | Université de Lorraine | Université de Tours | Université de Technologie de Belfort… […]
PySciDetect est une version améliorée du logiciel open source SciDetect permettant de détecter les résultats et données de recherche frauduleux dès leur soumission.Paris | Londres | Heidelberg, 31 mars 2022Springer Nature lance PySciDetect, un logiciel open source de nouvelle génération pour détecter les recherches frauduleuses. Développé en interne avec Slimmer AI et publié en collaboration avec le Dr Cyril Labbé de l'Université Grenoble Alpes, PySciDetect peut être téléchargé et utilisé par tous les éditeurs et l’ensemble de la communauté scientifique. Il repose sur le logiciel SciDetect datant de 2015 avec deux améliorations :Il tient compte des avancées de la technologie en matière… […]
Marianne Alunno-Bruscia When Marianne Alunno-Bruscia, the research integrity officer at France’s national oceanographic science institute, uncovered nearly a dozen papers with fraudulent authorship, she thought she’d stumbled on something bizarre. She didn’t know how right she was. As we reported in early February, the problems arose during an audit the research activities of the L’Institut Français de Recherche pour l’Exploitation de la Mer (iFREMER), which the organization was conducting to satisfy a request from the French High Council for Evaluation of Research and Higher Education – a bureaucratic headache, to be sure, but one which in this case proved well… […]
Professor Yuehong (Helen) Zhang is the Managing Editor of Bio-Design and Manufacturing. Previously she was the Chief Editor of Journal of Zhejiang University-SCIENCE, and Vice-President of the Society of China University Journals. She had served as a council member of ALPSP (2011–2016) and a Crossref Board Member (2014–2017). She received COPE’s first grant awarded in China in 2011 and has published many papers focused on anti-plagiarism policies in different disciplines, including several short papers in Nature and the book Against Plagiarism: A Guide for Editors and Authors. Recently she was invited to write a paper on academic integrity by the… […]
Authors who falsely add colleagues to grant applications attract 70% more funding, according to a recent analysis. 19 October 2021 ajijchan/Getty Images The illegal inclusion of false investigators on grant proposals and research papers should be classified as research misconduct, according to Eric Fong, co-author of multiple studies on the practice. The most recent paper, published in Research Policy in September, found that researchers who listed false investigators on grant applications attracted 70% more funding, on average, over a five-year period. The findings were based on anonymous responses to a survey of more than 10,000 researchers at 200 leading universities… […]
Authors : Rea Roje, Vicko Tomić, Ivan Buljan, Ana Marušić Research integrity (RI) guidance documents often lack sufficient details on handling specific RI issues causing the lack of harmonized approaches to RI and opening the way to research misconduct and other detrimental research practices. Standard operating procedures (SOPs) are developed and implemented by organizations for ensuring the uniformity and quality of performed actions. This study aimed to explore stakeholders’ opinions on SOPs for RI, factors influencing the implementation of RI guidance documents and practices, and ideas for improvements in the RI field. We conducted semi-structured interviews with stakeholders from different… […]
By David Lawder and Andrea Shalal WASHINGTON – The World Bank is taking steps to rebuild the credibility of its research after a data–rigging scandal forced it to cancel its flagship “Doing Business” report on country business climates, bank President David Malpass said on Monday. Speaking to reporters ahead of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund annual meetings this week, Mr. Malpass said strong research products remain a high priority for the bank and it would work on new ways to help countries improve their business climates. Asked how the bank would rebuild its credibility after the scandal, Malpass… […]
The road to reliable and trusted scientific research runs through a tangled terrain of ethical, accountability and assessment concerns that can be just as tough to surmount as the research question itself. A new blue-ribbon council convened by the United States’ National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine aims to tackle questions about nettlesome issues like conflict of interest, measuring impact and handling retractions.In an article appearing today at PNAS (but dated October 12), the three co-chairs of the new council detail the plan for the Strategic Council for Research Excellence, Integrity, and Trust and its goal “to optimize the… […]
Après un an et demi de pandémie pendant lequel des avis scientifiques contradictoires et des personnalités médiatiques controversées ont submergé le public et écorné sa confiance, la question de l'intégrité scientifique est centrale. Alors qu'une nouvelle étude australienne soulève la question des pressions externes reçues par les chercheurs de la part des financeurs, le président du comité d'éthique de l'Inserm Hervé Chneiweiss fait le point sur les véritables points d'achoppement de l'intégrité scientifique, à l'aube d'un "nouveau monde". Un chercheur sur cinq signale des pressions externes "Un chercheur sur cinq a déclaré avoir subi des pressions pour retarder, modifier ou… […]
By Mike Hearn | Daily Sceptic | July 22, 2021 It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgement of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. Marcia Angell Check out this image from a peer reviewed research paper that supposedly shows skin lesions being treated by a laser: Left: before treatment for keratoses. Right: after they were airbrushed out. (image diff… […]
Eight members of the editorial board of a scientific journal have resigned after it published a slew of controversial papers that critics fear could be used for DNA profiling and persecution of ethnic minorities in China. The journal, Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine, is the latest to be caught up in controversy involving ethically fraught research. Emails obtained by The Intercept show that the journal’s editor-in-chief has been slow to respond to queries about the papers, which involve research on Tibetans and Uyghurs, among other ethnic groups, and were first brought to her attention in March. The journal is published… […]
Advertisement In April 2021, a series of strange phrases in journal articles piqued the interest of a group of computer scientists. The group, led by Guillaume Cabanac at the University of Toulouse in France, could not understand why researchers would use the terms ‘counterfeit consciousness’, ‘profound neural organization’ and ‘colossal information’ in place of the more widely recognized terms ‘artificial intelligence’, ‘deep neural network’ and ‘big data’.Further investigation revealed that these strange terms — which they dub “tortured phrases” — are probably the result of automated translation or software that attempts to disguise plagiarism. And they seem to be rife… […]