Making the scientific literature fail-safe

[COVID-19 and medical publications: How three articles have influenced the media and public decisions in France]

Cet article détaille le processus et les aléas de publication de trois articles se rapportant au SARS-CoV-2 et à la maladie qu’il provoque (COVID-19). Ces trois articles ont été publiés à un mois d’intervalle, entre mars et mai 2020. Leur médiatisation a conduit les autorités de santé françaises à intervenir. Notre article ne s’intéresse pas et n’évalue pas la qualité scientifique des articles présentés, mais a pour unique objectif d’ouvrir la réflexion sur la publication médicale. En décrivant ces trois cas particuliers, il soulève des questions sur la rétractation des articles, l’évaluation par les pairs, la prépublication, la paternité des articles, et la diffusion des informations scientifiques médicales y compris via les médias de masse. Il discute des nouveaux modes d’édition qui se profilent et de la diffusion des informations publiées en recherche clinique.

Personal Motivations and Systemic Incentives: Scientists on Questionable Research Practices

As concern over the use of questionable research practices (QRPs) in academic science has increased over the last couple of decades, some reforms have been implemented and many others have been debated and recommended. While many of these proposals have merit, efforts to improve scientific practices are more likely to succeed when they are responsive to the prevailing views and concerns of scientists themselves. To date, there have been few efforts to solicit wide-ranging input from researchers on the topic of needed reforms. This article is a qualitative report of responses from federally funded scientists to the question of what should be done to address the problem of QRPs in their disciplines. Overall, participants were concerned about how institutional and career-oriented incentives encourage the use of QRPs. Compared to previous recommendations, participants had surprisingly little confidence in the ability of ethics training to improve research integrity.

Scientific Authors in a Changing World of Scholarly Communication: What Does the Future Hold?

Scholarly communication in science, technology, and medicine has been organized around journal-based scientific publishing for the past 350 years. Scientific publishing has unique business models and includes stakeholders with conflicting interests-publishers, funders, libraries, and scholars who create, curate, and consume the literature. Massive growth and change in scholarly communication, coinciding with digitalization, have amplified stresses inherent in traditional scientific publishing, as evidenced by overwhelmed editors and reviewers, increased retraction rates, emergence of pseudo-journals, strained library budgets, and debates about the metrics of academic recognition for scholarly achievements. Simultaneously, several open access models are gaining traction and online technologies offer opportunities to augment traditional tasks of scientific publishing, develop integrated discovery services, and establish global and equitable scholarly communication through crowdsourcing, software development, big data management, and machine learning. These rapidly evolving developments raise financial, legal, and ethical dilemmas that require solutions, while successful strategies are difficult to predict. Key challenges and trends are reviewed from the authors' perspective about how to engage the scholarly community in this multifaceted process.

Ethical Consistency and Experience: An Attempt to Influence Researcher Attitudes Toward Questionable Research Practices Through Reading Prompts

Over the past couple of decades, the apparent widespread occurrence of Questionable Research Practices (QRPs) in scientific research has been widely discussed in the research ethics literature as a source of concern. Various ways of reducing their use have been proposed and implemented, ranging from improved training and incentives for adopting best practices to systematic reforms. This article reports on the results of two studies that investigated the efficacy of simple, psychological interventions aimed at changing researcher attitudes toward QRPs. While the interventions did not significantly modify researchers’ reactions to QRPs, they showed differential efficacy depending on scientists’ experience, suggesting complexities in researcher psychology and the ethics of QRPs that merit further study.

Testing an active intervention to deter researchers' use of questionable research practices

INTRODUCTION

In this study, we tested a simple, active "ethical consistency" intervention aimed at reducing researchers' endorsement of questionable research practices (QRPs).

METHODS

We developed a simple, active ethical consistency intervention and tested it against a control using an established QRP survey instrument. Before responding to a survey that asked about attitudes towards each of fifteen QRPs, participants were randomly assigned to either a consistency or control 3-5-min writing task. A total of 201 participants completed the survey: 121 participants were recruited from a database of currently funded NSF/NIH scientists, and 80 participants were recruited from a pool of active researchers at a large university medical center in the southeastern US. Narrative responses to the writing prompts were coded and analyzed to assist post hoc interpretation of the quantitative data.

RESULTS

We hypothesized that participants in the consistency condition would find ethically ambiguous QRPs less defensible and would indicate less willingness to engage in them than participants in the control condition. The results showed that the consistency intervention had no significant effect on respondents' reactions regarding the defensibility of the QRPs or their willingness to engage in them. Exploratory analyses considering the narrative themes of participants' responses indicated that participants in the control condition expressed lower perceptions of QRP defensibility and willingness.

CONCLUSION

The results did not support the main hypothesis, and the consistency intervention may have had the unwanted effect of inducing increased rationalization. These results may partially explain why RCR courses often seem to have little positive effect.

Figure errors, sloppy science, and fraud: keeping eyes on your data

Recent reports suggest that there has been an increase in the number of retractions and corrections of published articles due to post-publication detection of problematic data. Moreover, fraudulent data and sloppy science have long-term effects on the scientific literature and subsequent projects based on false and unreproducible claims. At the JCI, we have introduced several data screening checks for manuscripts prior to acceptance in an attempt to reduce the number of post-publication corrections and retractions, with the ultimate goal of increasing confidence in the papers we publish.