back to article New study: 'Fraud behind two-thirds of pulled medical papers'

Medical boffins are rarely wrong when they publish in journals - but some are prepared to lie quite a lot, according to a new study on retracted scientific papers. Previous studies have claimed that most papers are pulled from publication because there's some error in them, but this fresh investigation claims malpractice is …

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  1. NorthernCoder
    Coat

    As Tom Lehrer so brilliantly put it in "Lobachevsky"

    "Let no one else's work evade your eyes

    Remember why the good Lord made your eyes

    So don't shade your eyes

    But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize

    Only be sure always to call it please 'research' "

    1. EddieD

      Re: As Tom Lehrer so brilliantly put it in "Lobachevsky"

      I quote this to all the students whose projects I assist.

      The guy has a quote for almost all situations.

    2. Graham Marsden
      Thumb Up

      Re: As Tom Lehrer so brilliantly put it in "Lobachevsky"

      Remember the old student maxim:

      Copying from one source is plagiarism.

      Copying from three sources is research!

  2. Robert Grant
    Black Helicopters

    Pfff

    I bet this investigation was commissioned by anti-capitalist, bleeding heart, constantly-gardening liberals, who all hate the noble art of pharmaceutical profiteering. I wouldn't trust it as far as I could throw it.

    1. Euripides Pants

      Whooosh

      That's the sound of the sarcasm going over the downvoter's heads.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Climate change

    All they have to do is add climate change to the title and they will get all the funding they need.

    So instead of titles such as:

    "The effect of directly observed therapy on the rates of drug resistance and relapse in tuberculosis"

    They could use titles like:

    "The effect of directly observed computer modelled therapy on the rates of drug resistance and relapse in tuberculosis in a warming world"

    and their chances of getting funded will dramatically increase.

    1. g e
      Holmes

      Re: Climate change

      My thoughts exactly... the funding's hard to get cos the Warmists are so darn good at shilling for the pork so they can fund shilling for pork for a while longer.

  4. Bernard

    Wouldn't it be wonderful

    If he'd fraudulently manipulated the data to win grant money for his research into the increasing incidence of fraudulent manipulation of data to win grant money.

    1. Anonymous Coward 15

      Re: Wouldn't it be wonderful

      Yo dawg, we heard you like grant money...

    2. Michael Dunn

      Re: Wouldn't it be wonderful

      I think Apple have a patent on that!

  5. This post has been deleted by its author

  6. Harry
    Happy

    Re: fraudulently manipulated the data

    Purely for research purposes, of course.

  7. Robin 3

    Freud fraud

    First time I scanned this headline I saw "Freud behind two thirds...". I wasn't surprised either. A sort of Freudian slip I suppose.

  8. Armando 123

    Really?

    "Milking governments for cash for projects with no obvious monetary value has always been tough,"

    Not if you are a researcher at Harvard(*).

    * - Or Princeton. Or Cal Tech. Or Michigan. Or ...

    1. Bernard

      Re: Really?

      It's even easier if you're an ex-politician or civil servant setting up a QUANGO or lobbying agency.

      You scratch my back I'll make sure your tiny salary doesn't stop you buying a small island in the Bahamas (like Jamaica) to retire on.

    2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: Really?

      So how many government research grants have you written and had approved, then?

  9. Dodgy Geezer Silver badge
    FAIL

    When we asked about Climate Change...

    ..they always told us that it was unbelievable that anyone so interested in truth as a scientist could ever put out a fraudulent paper.

    Never mind - I'm sure it could never happen in Climate Science...

  10. Arachnoid

    Scientists have been misrepresenting data ever since E=MC2

    1. P. Lee
      Holmes

      > Scientists have been misrepresenting data ever since E=MC2

      and even Einstein said that not everything which was worthwhile could be counted and not everything which could be counted was worthwhile.

  11. Trygve

    well, duh, naturally the tail starts to wag the dog...

    ... once you base all your dog management on tail measurement.

    Scientists fake published studies, because a while ago universities started to rate all their faculty according to number of publications, on the basis that good scientists had lots of publications. Once you basically got paid by the number of articles you got in the journals, no-one cared about whether it was a meaningful article any longer.

    Similarly, a few years back someone commented that many successful companies had lots of patents First every company focused on churning out bullshit patents so they would look successful, then they looked at all the millions they had spent doing the paperwork and wondered how to recoup the cost, and now look where we are.

  12. Scroticus Canis
    Boffin

    The Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York

    Que? Have the 'Merkins confused physicist with physician?

    Since when did E=MC2 and curved space-time have anything to do with microbiology, immunology and medicine?

    Just an observation.

    1. despairing citizen
      Happy

      Re: The Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York

      and the Max Planck Institute does mental health research

      ....although if you've tried to wrap your head around quantum physics for long enough, maybe the trick cyclist research team isn't that odd

  13. Jtom

    Not capitalism - GREED

    This problem wouldn't exist if research and educational institutions didn't tolerate such fraud. The penalty should be expulsion from the research community, not a slap on the risk and extracting a promise to do better in the future (oh, and you can keep the research grant).

    And this isn't an outcome of capitalism; it's greed. Greed for money, fame, admiration, or respect., just like teachers who cheat on class test scores. It is well known that many USSR climate studies were (are?) compromised by researchers deliberately misreporting temperatures. How much coal/heating fuel they got from the government was dependent upon how cold it was, so they reported falsely lower temperatures. (Now that actual temps are being reported, the USSR/Russia 'warm-up' is part of climate change!).

    Returning to this problem: the penalty for deliberate falsification of research should be to rescind that person's credentials, and ban him/her from research in that field.

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