Biomed Central, a leading UK-based medical journal, has recently retracted 43 published articles after discovering that they were deem falsified. The authors, all Chinese doctors, completely compromised the integrity of the process of publishing scientific articles. The articles were deemed “fake” because the doctors were using the services of agents for the “selling pre-written manuscripts to fabricate contact details for peer reviewers.”
The peer review process is key in all kinds of published works, but especially in the medical world, where it is likely to affect patients. One of these doctors is Yang Jainmin, associate chief physician of Hangzhou First People’s Hospital, who “told the Caixin magazine that he paid $3,220 to the agency.”
When questioned about the reasoning behind this, Yang explained that he simply did not have enough time due to a high volume of surgeries. He says that the government’s regulations make it difficult to be promoted in hospitals without have a substantial amount of articles published in scientific journals. This is a controversial story, especially in light of China recently passing the UK in their number of theses published.
Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/Chinese-docs-behind-41-of-43-fake-articles-in-British-journal/articleshow/46810425.cms
Faculty at W&L face a “publish or perish” mandate, though it is interpreted in different ways in different fields (eg, a music professor may get credit for compositions or for being a guest conductor for a prestigious group). There are certainly US academics who publish almost-identical papers in journal after journal (even at least one Nobel laureate employed that tactic to evangelize his work among non-economist audiences, eg law and business and sociology).
Many journal referees are sloppy; they get no brownie points from spending an hour writing up a constructive critique of a paper. While some of us put in the time to do it right, we can then see the reports of the other 1-2 referees who sometimes show no evidence of having read the submission carefully.
I’m surprised to hear that’s the state of academic research, especially medical research in China. I have no doubt that government regulations are far too overbearing, but the idea that a doctor would fudge the results of a thesis involving surgery is concerning. It would be interesting to know how many patients were subject to this particular treatment, and what the mortality rate was.
I agree with the above post ^. I find it astounding that doctors would fake medical documents in order to gain notoriety. This act seems against their oath of helping and healing others. The unauthenticated results published in their papers could do damage to many patients down the road if those papers were to influence treatment practices.