WASHINGTON -- Scientific research needs to be better managed to reduce the incidence of fraud, retractions of research papers, and undue influence of industry, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine said in a .
"Serious cases of research misconduct -- including some that have gone undetected for years -- continue to emerge with disturbing regularity in the United States and around the world," Robert Nerem, PhD, chair of one of the two committees that wrote the report, said in the publication's preface.
"Increases in the number and percentage of research articles that are retracted and growing concern about low rates of reproducibility in some research fields raise questions about how the research enterprise can better ensure that investments in research produce reliable knowledge."
"It is necessary for all of us involved in performing, managing, funding, and communicating research to commit to improving practices in our own organizations and disciplines as well as more broadly."
The report did note that the increased incidence of retractions appearing in scientific journals "does not necessarily indicate that the incidence of misconduct is also increasing; other factors such as more vigilant scrutiny by the community and retractions becoming a more common practice among journals may be contributing factors."
On the other hand, "new forms of detrimental research practices are also appearing, such as 'predatory' journals that do little or no editorial review or quality control of papers while also charging authors substantial fees, and predatory conferences that charge researchers to speak at conferences that subsequently are cancelled," the report continued. It also cited the problem of "ghost authorship" of industry-produced papers.
The national academies last wrote about this issue in 1992, Nerem noted at a Tuesday afternoon press briefing. "It was long overdue to come back and look at this again. Our original intent was an update of the 1992 report; the fact of the matter is that things have changed so much ... it really needed a fresh look."
To address these problems, the authors made several recommendations, including:
- All stakeholders in research -- including researchers, research institutions, research sponsors, journals, and societies -- should improve and update their practices and policies to promote integrity.
- Research institutions should maintain the highest standards for research conduct, going beyond simple compliance with federal regulations in undertaking research misconduct investigations and in other areas.
- Research institutions and federal agencies should ensure that good-faith whistleblowers are protected and that their concerns are addressed quickly and thoroughly.
- A Research Integrity Advisory Board (RIAB) should be established as an independent nonprofit organization to work with all stakeholders to share expertise and approaches for addressing unethical practices.
- Societies and journals should develop clear standards on authorship, requiring that everyone making significant contributions to the work be listed as authors, and specifying that gift or honorary authorship, coercive authorship, ghost authorship, and omission of authors who have met the articulated standards are always unacceptable.
- Research sponsors and journal and book publishers should ensure that information sufficient for reproducing the reported results is made available at the time of publication or as soon as possible after publication.
- Federal funding agencies and other research sponsors should allocate sufficient funds for long-term storage, archiving, and access of datasets and code needed to replicate published findings.
- To avoid unproductive duplication of research and to permit effective judgments on the statistical significance of findings, researchers should routinely disclose all statistical tests carried out, including negative findings. Research sponsors, research institutions, and journals should support and encourage this level of transparency.
- Researchers, research sponsors, and research institutions should continue to develop and assess more effective education and other programs that support the integrity of research.
One of the biggest problems in trying to reduce misconduct and detrimental research is the lack of available data on the current situation, Nerem, professor emeritus at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said during the briefing.
"You look at science and research as data-driven, and yet when it comes to looking at issues of research misconduct and detrimental research practices, there's no data one can really rely on," Nerem said. "So it's impossible to say what the incidence of [these problems] really is."
In addition, more needs to be done to help whistleblowers who raise questions about problems with research, said C.K. "Tina" Gunsalus, JD, director of the National Center for Professional and Research Ethics, in Urbana, Ill.
"Making fact-based as opposed to personality-based decisions in the heat of the moment is a complicated thing," she said.
"The single most effective thing that we ever found was finding a person of seniority to be the advisor to the person raising the questions, and help level the playing field throughout the process."