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Preventing Scientific Fraud
- Harold C. Sox, MD, Editor; and
- Drummond Rennie, MD
- From the American College of Physicians, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and The Institute for Health Policy Studies, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California.
IN RESPONSE:
Dr. Noble feels that journals should do more to prevent scientific fraud. He proposes that journals do an in-depth investigation of randomly chosen articles. Research misconduct is almost always detected inside the institution. In 1988, Dr. Rennie proposed doing such a random audit of accepted manuscripts as an experiment, the results to be published only in aggregate (1, 2). The idea was to measure the frequency of the grossest forms of misconduct, for example, how often researchers sent in papers based entirely on fabricated patients, as had happened in the cases of Soman and of Darsee (3) …
