Information and computer technology has come to play an increasingly important role in medicine, to the extent that e-health has been described as a disruptive innovation or revolution in healthcare. The attention is very much focused on the technology itself, and advances that have been made in genetics and biology. This leads to the question: What is changing in medicine today concerning e-health? To what degree could these changes be characterized as a 'revolution'? We will apply the work of Thomas Kuhn, Larry Laudan, Michel Foucault and other philosophers-which offers an alternative understanding of progress and revolution in medicine to the classic discovery-oriented approach-to our analysis. Nowadays, the long-standing curative or reactive paradigm in medicine is facing a crisis due to an aging population, a significant increase in chronic diseases and the development of more expensive diagnostic tools and therapies. This promotes the evolution towards a new paradigm with an emphasis on preventive medicine. E-health constitutes an essential part of this new paradigm that seeks to solve the challenges presented by an aging population, skyrocketing costs and so forth. Our approach changes the focus from the technology itself toward the underlying paradigm shift in medicine. We will discuss the relevance of this approach by applying it to the surge in digital self-tracking through health apps and wearables: the recognition of the underlying paradigm shift leads to a more comprehensive understanding of self-tracking than a solely discovery-oriented or technology-focused view can provide.

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Research institutions are responsible for promoting research integrity and handling allegations of research misconduct. Due to various cultural and social contexts, institutional policies from different cultural backgrounds exhibit many differences, such as their primary concern and mechanisms for dealing with allegations of research misconduct. This comparative study analyses research misconduct policies from 21 Chinese and 22 European universities. The results show that definitions of research misconduct from all retrieved policies go beyond fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism but include different types of questionable research practices. Their procedures for handling research misconduct differ in, for example, confidentiality and disclosure of conflict of interest. Differences can also be found in their governance approaches (“bottom-up” versus “top-down”).

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