Unethical practices within medical research and publication – An exploratory study

Abstract

The data produced by the scientific community impacts on academia, clinicians, and the general public; therefore, the scientific community and other regulatory bodies have been focussing on ethical codes of conduct. Despite the measures taken by several research councils, unethical research, publishing and/or reviewing behaviours still take place. This exploratory study considers some of the current unethical practices and the reasons behind them and explores the ways to discourage these within research and other professional disciplinary bodies. These interviews/discussions with PhD students, technicians, and academics/principal investigators (PIs) (N=110) were conducted mostly in European higher education institutions including UK, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, Czech Republic and Netherlands.Through collegiate discussions, sharing experiences and by examining previously published/reported information, authors have identified several less reported behaviours. Some of these practices are mainly influenced either by the undue institutional expectations of research esteem or by changes in the journal review process. These malpractices can be divided in two categories relating to (a) methodological malpractices including data management, and (b) those that contravene publishing ethics. The former is mostly related to “committed bias”, by which the author selectively uses the data to suit their own hypothesis, methodological malpractice relates to selection of out-dated protocols that are not suited to the intended work. Although these are usually unintentional, incidences of intentional manipulations have been reported to authors of this study. For example, carrying out investigations without positive (or negative) controls; but including these from a previous study. Other methodological malpractices include unfair repetitions to gain statistical significance, or retrospective ethical approvals. In contrast, the publication related malpractices such as authorship malpractices, ethical clearance irregularities have also been reported. The findings also suggest a globalised approach with clear punitive measures for offenders is needed to tackle this problem.

Exploring Ethical Considerations in Research: Guidelines and Practices

“…Authorship conflict results when anyone who has contributed in any form to a piece of research work, be it planning, ideation, designing, execution of experiment/ study, data collection, analysis or reporting/drafting, has an authorship claim to the same, which is not decided upon and informed before the publication of the work in journals (Wiwanitkit et al (2017)). Also, if anyone cited in the article does not approve the publication of the work, it is considered an authorship conflict and unethical (Sivasubramaniam et al (2021)). Such a type of conflict often arises when a person whose name is included in the paper has not contributed in any form to the study.…”

Medical Professionalism: Do We Practice What We Preach?

“…Moreover, there are discrimination and gender harassment (5), as well as oppressive and suppressive exertion of powers of hierarchy (6). In research, the students see fabrication and manipulation of data, unethical research practice to suit the vested interests of the researcher, clinicians, pharmaceutical companies, and political stakeholders (7), as well as guest and ghost authorships, plagiarism, and infringement of intellectual property rights (8). Even in their general sur-roundings, they witness malpractice by medical professionals and doctors adopting illegal means to evade their due taxation (9); corruption in the purchase and supply of hospital equipment, drugs, and other consumables and non-consumables (10); sexual harassment; power abuse; drug abuse; and breach of agreement of confidentiality.…”