Correcting the scientific record – A broken system?

ABSTRACT

The current system for assessing and publicly notifying concerns about publication integrity is slow, inefficient, inconsistent, inadequate, and opaque. Readers are, therefore, left unaware of potential issues about publications or are given inadequate information to assess publication integrity. We propose a new process for dealing with publication integrity involving the establishment of independent panel(s) that assess publication integrity and transparently report the outcomes of those assessments, independent of the assessment of any misconduct.

KEYWORDS:

• Publication integrity
• retraction
• expression of concern

Contributions

MB, AA, AG, and AK are all clinical academics with an interest in publication integrity. MB, AA, and AG have been involved in raising concerns about publication integrity in several cases involving hundreds of articles. AK is the Editor-in-Chief of Anaesthesia and regularly identifies concerns about publication integrity and manages the process of investigating them. The article arose out of discussions between the authors on the problems we have experienced and possible solutions. All authors contributed to these discussions. MB drafted the paper. All authors critically reviewed and improved it. MB is the guarantor for the article. All authors had access to all the data. MB takes responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.

Data sharing

There are no research data in the paper, but the corresponding author can be contacted for more details about the cases discussed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The authors received no specific funding for this work. MB is the recipient of an HRC Clinical Practitioner Fellowship. The Health Services Research Unit is funded by the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorates. The authors are independent of the HRC. The HRC had no role in study design, the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data, the writing of the article, or the decision to submit it for publication.