Is it Time to Lock up those who Commit Research Fraud?

Two experts have engaged in a lively debate about whether research fraud should be classed as a criminal act. The resulting article is posted today on thebmj.com.

Criminal sanctions are necessary to deter growing research misconduct, believes Zulfiqar Bhutta, PhD, Robert Harding Chair in global child health and policy and Co-Director of the Centre for Global Child Health at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada. He says the fact that research fraud is common is no longer news, but a review by PubMed in 2012 found that 67% of research article retractions were “attributable to scientific misconduct, including fraud or suspected fraud”.

Bhutta thinks the consequences of research fraud on human health can be “huge” and that, for instance, the damage to global vaccination coverage by Andrew Wakefield “has been incalculable”. Wakefield, however, lives a free man, “raking in money from various support groups.” Criminal proceedings after serious research fraud are rare, with such practice being dealt with by institutions, he adds.

Although he accepts it is hard to differentiate between fraud and incompetence, errors and misunderstanding, he argues that that “deliberate fraud is often prevalent.” Plus, investigations are often expensive, costing between $116,160 and $2,192,620 per case. Current measures are not enough: “Although many perpetrators of research fraud never return to academic life; others may claw their way back to active research."

But Julian Crane, professor of clinical epidemiology at the Department of Medicine at the University of Otago in New Zealand, argues that criminalization would not have any deterrent effect and would undermine trust rather than improve it. Crane says the former editor of The BMJ, Richard Smith, MD, recently defined research misconduct as “the gentlemanly phrase for scientific fraud” and asks who “would not have fallen foul of this definition, so are we all fraudsters?"

Smith says research fraud is “terrifyingly common”, but only one in every 18,234 published abstracts are retracted because of real or suspected misconduct, which Crane adds “seems refreshingly small”.

Crane appreciates that research misconduct does cause harm, but asks “would inviting the police to investigate more satisfactorily uncover misconduct or prevent harm?" He believes that it lies with research organizations to reduce opportunities for misconduct and investigate appropriately. Criminalizing research misconduct "is a sad, bad, even mad idea that will only undermine the trust that is an essential component of research and requires good governance not criminal investigators."

Read the full release here.