Scientific misconduct in publishing

Imposing discipline on deception

25-Oct-2007

Unethical behaviour in science is a long and dishonourable story. And it is continually being updated. As recently as 2006, the international scientific community was deeply shaken when the South Korean stem-cell researcher, Hwang Woo Suk, was found to have fabricated his research evidence, although his articles had been rigorously reviewed by and published in Science magazine.

Closer to home, ETH Zurich reacted firmly to the bleak reality of duplicity in science when in 2002 Bell Labs physicist, Jan Hendrik Schön, was found to have engaged in scientific fraud. The university reacted by instituting the 'Procedure to address allegations of research misconduct at ETH Zurich' to combat falsification in research that, by extension, would also affect publishing.

Three researchers at ETH Zurich's Professorship for Social Psychology and Research on Higher Education (D-GESS) have now addressed review procedures for publishing scientific papers. Drs Lutz Bornmann, Irina Nast and Professor Hans-Dieter Daniel, in an article to be published in Scientometrics, called their analysis 'Do editors and referees look for signs of scientific misconduct when reviewing manuscripts?'

The ETH Zurich investigation explored the rules that define acceptance standards for the publication of scientific manuscripts. The project evaluated 46 research studies published between 1967 and 2006 that examined editors' and referees' criteria for the assessment of manuscripts and their grounds for accepting or rejecting manuscripts. . The project revealed that scientific papers were reviewed according to nine main criteria which reviewers felt were most important. Each of those nine areas had up to six different underlying dimensions.

The ETH Zurich researchers primarily focused on ethics, the last of the nine criteria that were listed in descending order. 'Relevance of contribution' was number one, seemingly influenced by a manuscript's perceived "importance, newness and originality". Interestingly, none of the 46 studies defined falsification of information or fabrication of data as a specific area on which to focus. That absence, in itself, may answer the question of how reviewers could miss obvious cases of fraud, such as that of Hwang or Schön.

Despite this omission, the ETH Zurich researchers found repeated instances of 'quality of research' as one of the underlying themes of each of the top three main criteria. In opposition to criticism levelled at the peer review process in the wake of the more recent sensational incidents of scientific fraud, the researchers conclude that the importance of 'quality of research' in the assessment of a manuscript does indeed play an important role in the review process.

https://www.chemeurope.com/en/news/72437/scientific-misconduct-in-publishing.html