PMID: 16522625Mar 9, 2006Paper

Research misconduct, retraction, and cleansing the medical literature: lessons from the Poehlman case

Annals of Internal Medicine
Harold C Sox, Drummond Rennie

Abstract

The scientific literature is a record of the search for truth. Publication of faked data diverts this search. The scientific community has a duty to warn people to ignore an article containing faked data and must try to prevent inadvertent citation of it. The scientific community accomplishes these tasks by publishing a retraction and linking it to the fraudulent article's citation in electronic indexes of the medical literature, such as PubMed. This mechanism is far from perfect, as shown by a case history of scientific fraud perpetrated by Eric Poehlman, PhD. His institution notified 3 journals that they had published tainted articles. Two journals failed to retract. The third journal retracted immediately, but other authors continued to cite the retracted article. Another duty of the scientific community is to verify the integrity of other articles published by the author of a fraudulent article. This task falls to the author's institution and requires coauthors to vouch for their article's integrity by convincing institutional investigators that the suspect author could not have altered the raw scientific data from their study. Two universities are currently investigating Poehlman's published research. Maintaining the integ...Continue Reading

Citations

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