The debate on criminalising research fraud

The BMJ has featured an article in which two experts go head to head discussing the potential criminalisation of research fraud. Dr Zulfiqar Bhutta believes criminal sanctions are necessary to deter growing research misconduct, while Dr Julian Crane argues that criminalisation would not have any deterrent effect and would only undermine trust.

Dr Bhutta, from the Centre for Global Child Health at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, said research fraud is on the rise, noting, “A review of 2047 retracted biomedical research articles indexed by PubMed up to 3 May 2012 found that 67.4% of retractions were attributable to scientific misconduct, including fraud or suspected fraud (43.4%), duplicate publication (14.2%) and plagiarism (9.8%).” Dr Bhutta acknowledges that “research fraud may be difficult to differentiate from incompetence, errors, bias and misunderstanding … [but] evidence suggests that deliberate fraud is prevalent”. Fraud has been implicated in high-profile cases, he said, involving researchers, the drug industry and manufacturers.

Dr Bhutta said, “The consequences of research fraud on human health and clinical practice can be huge,” referring to the now-debunked research by Andrew Wakefield which linked the MMR vaccine and autism, as well as non-existent pain research studies by Scott Reuben. Reuben was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, but Wakefield remains a free man. Dr Bhutta noted that as serious research fraud cases are usually dealt with by institutions and academic bodies, criminal proceedings are rare; thus, he says the practice offers “relatively little risk for potentially great rewards” and believes “additional deterrence through punitive measures such as criminal proceedings should be added to the repertoire of measures available”.

Dr Crane, from the Department of Medicine at the University of Otago in New Zealand, acknowledged that most retractions “have resulted from proved or suspected misconduct”. However, he said if one were to apply the figure of 67.4% to PubMed’s index of abstracts published since 1977 (when the first retraction was published), “then one in every 18,234 published abstracts is subsequently retracted because of real or suspected misconduct” - a rate he describes as “refreshingly small”. And while the retraction rate has increased since the 1970s, with electronic publication making misconduct easier to track, Dr Crane believes “pressure has also increased on researchers to publish quickly and with as much impact as possible to ensure ongoing funding and academic promotion”.

The solution, claims Dr Crane, is for “research organisations and their staff to reduce opportunities for misconduct, encourage open and verifiable information on which trust can be built, investigate appropriately and correct misconduct”. In the Wakefield case, he said, the study centred around 12 children, whose histories could have easily been verified by the study’s 13 authors. Dr Crane recommended the UK Research Integrity Office and the US Office of Research Integrity, which help researchers and organisations deal with misconduct without undermining trust, and stated, “No matter what criminal sanctions are enacted, there will always remain considerable opportunity for deception by researchers that is much better prevented by transparency in an appropriate institutional environment.”

The article can be viewed here.