Fostering Integrity in Research (2017) / Chapter Skim
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5 Incidence and Consequences
5 Incidence and Consequences
Pages 77-90
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From page 77... ...
THE INCIDENCE OF RESEARCH MISCONDUCT AND DETRIMENTAL RESEARCH PRACTICES The Responsible Science report (NAS-NAE-IOM, 1992) found that "existing data are inadequate to draw accurate conclusions about the incidence of mis 77
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From page 78... ...
. • In 2012 the University of Connecticut found that cardiovascular re searcher Dipak Das fabricated or falsified data 145 times in his work on resveratrol (Science, 2012)
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From page 79... ...
The same meta-analysis showed that actions discussed in Chapter 4 as examples of detrimental research practices (DRPs) are relatively common.
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From page 80... ...
. Retraction rates, particularly at the country and disciplinary level, can be skewed by the serial misconduct cases mentioned above, where a researcher has fabricated or falsified data underlying tens of articles (Grieneisen and Zhang, 2012)
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From page 81... ...
Figure 5-1 illustrates these costs. Examples of the many individual costs of research misconduct and DRPs are wasted efforts of researchers who trusted a fabricated paper and did work to build on it, damage done to innocent collaborators (including graduate students and FIGURE 5-1 Costs and consequences of research misconduct and detrimental research practices (DRPs)
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From page 82... ...
to the entire set of 291 retracted articles would yield a total of $123.7 million, "which might be considered an estimate of the total NIH funds directly spent on known biomedical research retracted due to misconduct over the past 20 years" (Stern et al., 2014)
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From page 83... ...
. This raises the possibility that deaths and other adverse events occurred due to administering treatments developed on the basis of fraudulent work, and it has necessitated researchers going back over the literature to see what findings can be salvaged and what experiments need to be redone (White et al., 2009)
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From page 84... ...
To the extent that fabricated papers impede drug and treatment development by leading researchers down the wrong track, they also impose financial costs on companies and public health costs on society. The Reproducibility Problem, Research Misconduct, and Detrimental Research Practices Meta-analyses of research on particular research questions and even entire fields have produced new insights on the reliability of research.
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From page 85... ...
According to a widely discussed analysis, systematic biases led to false positive findings in half or more published studies (Ioannidis, 2005)
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From page 86... ...
. High-pressure research environments, poor publication practices, and funding patterns that create perverse incentives are presumed to be contributing factors (Alberts et al., 2014)
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From page 87... ...
The uncertainty surrounding this estimate points to the need to better quantify the costs and causes of the reproducibility problem in specific fields and across the research enterprise. In addition to the direct financial costs, results that are irreproducible due to DRPs have some indirect costs that are similar in type to those that are incurred due to research misconduct, such as delays in rejecting and confirming key results, the time and effort of the researchers involved, and the time and effort of those seeking to build on false results.
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From page 88... ...
Estimating a Range of Financial Costs of Research Misconduct and DRPs From this discussion and the existing evidence, it is possible to develop a reasonable range of the estimated costs borne by the research enterprise and the broader society due to research misconduct and DRPs. For example, the analysis discussed above estimated that confirmed cases of research misconduct directly affected about one-tenth of one percent of NIH extramural funding over the 1992-2012 period, implying an annual total of about $30 million for one agency if this relationship were to continue going forward.
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From page 89... ...
The financial costs of DRPs in the form of funding for research that does not produce reliable knowledge may be even larger than the analogous costs of research misconduct. There is much still to be learned about irreproducibility in research, including the extent to which DRPs are implicated and how significant a problem it is in fields other those where it is being actively examined such as biomedical research and social psychology.
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