Understanding and avoiding scientific misconduct
Scientific misconduct, authorship and conflict of interestLearning outcomes:
- Describe the purpose of and criteria for authorship
- Explain how disputes over authorship might be prevented and/or resolved
- Define conflicts of interest
- Discuss how failure of reproducibility may indicate scientific misconduct
- Discuss how research misconduct may introduce bias into the research findings.
Learning outcomes:
- Why it is necessary to declare conflicts of interest (COI)
- Definitions of COI
- Potential COI in health services research
- Potential COI in industry-sponsored research
- Public reporting of industry payments to health professionals
- Handling COI for other types of journal article
- Potential COI for editors, journals, and publishers.
Learning outcomes:
- Authorship: how it is defined, and why it matters
- How MEDLINE and journals list authors
- Journal policies and practices to safeguard authorship
- Guest, gift, and ghost authors and other authorship problems
- Attribution for shared datasets.
Learning outcomes:
- How plagiarism and text recycling are defined
- How common plagiarism is
- Factors associated with plagiarism
- Use of plagiarism detection tools by publishers
- How to avoid plagiarism and how to respond if caught.
Learning outcomes:
- Scientific fraud as data fabrication and deliberate falsification
- The extent and harms of scientific fraud
- Techniques journals may use to uncover fraud: statistical analysis, mage checking, linguistic analysis, investigative journalism, peer review (pre- and post-publication), data sharing.
- Barriers to tackling fraud
- Principles of research integrity.
Learning outcomes:
- How and why journals respond to suspected misconduct that relates to submitted and published articles
- The role of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)
- The roles of authors’ institutions and research integrity organisations in investigating possible misconduct
- Reasons for, and impacts of, retractions in biomedical and health research
- How MEDLINE corrects the literature.