Research misconduct ...can delay meaningful and reliable discoveries

Dr Gráinne McNamara, Research Integrity/Publication Ethics Manager, S. Karger AG explores how research misconduct, peer review fraud slow down pharma research. Of particular concern to India is the fact that India-based researchers constitute 5 per cent of articles in life sciences retracted between 1976-2023. India-based researchers also have one of the highest rates of retraction relative to the overall publication output. Over an email exchange with Viveka Roychowdhury, she details how publishers are now deploying AI tools, some of which contributed to the problem in the first place, to detect and avert fraudulent research submissions

- By Viveka Roychowdhury

In terms of peer review fraud, research misconduct, how large is the problem, globally and specifically for pharma/life science research papers being published out of India?

In recent years, we have seen increased reporting in scholarly and traditional news on instances of suspected research misconduct and publication integrity violations. This has ranged from investigations into individual authors or researcher groups to large-scale retraction of many thousands of articles. The observed increase in the number of articles being retracted can be attributed, in part, to improvements in detection systems by publishers; however, it may also reflect a change in the rate of research or publication misconduct.

There are no completely accurate rates of research misconduct or peer review fraud available, in part because of the existence of as yet undiscovered misconduct and the high professional cost of admitting to misconduct. Some attempts to quantify this exist, for example, a 2016 study found that just under 4 per cent of screened published papers contained problematic images [1].

Another study looking at nucleotide sequences found that 713 out of >3400 screened articles contained incorrectly described nucleotide sequences [2]. Even less certain is the prevalence of misconduct in unpublished works. An analysis on paper mills from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the STM Association [3] found that publishers reported that between 2-46 per cent of the submissions to a journal can be suspected of having paper mill involvement.