Originally published February 23 2006
Science editors on the lookout for research fraud
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Peter Dizikes of the Boston Globe looks at the quandary of scientific journals, whose editors must now protect themselves against fraudulent research.
EARLIER THIS month, the journal Science formally retracted two papers by South Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk and his colleagues, whose claims about creating stem cell lines from cloned human embryos were revealed to be false.
In December, The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) declared that a report it published in 2000 on the painkiller Vioxx contained ''inaccuracies" due to incomplete data on potential side effects.
And on Friday, the NEJM issued an ''expression of concern" that two cancer-research studies it published in 2001 and 2004 appeared to contain misleading evidence-just days after the British medical journal The Lancet made its own announcement that a 2005 study from the same Norwegian-based research team included fabricated data.
In the wake of these and other science scandals in the past several years-ranging from fabricated findings to misleadingly incomplete data-some editors of science publications are rethinking their roles and asking themselves whether they should act more like muckraking investigators than purveyors of scientific discovery.
''Journals cannot be investigating prosecutors or detectives," says Edward Campion, senior deputy editor at the NEJM, expressing a view common even among reform-minded science editors.
The global growth of scientific research, often with corporate backing, has placed some severe limitations on the ability of editors to do investigative spadework.
But there are also signs that editors are beginning to develop new ideas about oversight in science, and some science journals have recently performed innovative acts of detection to expose falsified results.
''Sometimes people say, 'Why don't you check everything?"' says Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
JAMA receives about 7,000 submissions per year.
And even if journals did have a dedicated staff for detective work, they would still lack the funding to reproduce most big-time science research.
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