Scientists uncover a case of malpractice in biomedical research
Lucas Carey , a researcher at the Department of Experimental and Health Sciences (CEXS), and Guillaume Filion, a researcher at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), discovered a number of scientific articles that were, to use their description, " disturbingly similar" while performing a literature search on the most common topics in biomedical research. They worked with 1,980,000 abstracts of articles in the PubMed database published since 2012.
When looking at the results of their search,Carey and Filion realized that one of the most repeated keywords was "CISCOM", the medical literature database of the Research Council for Complementary Medicine, which has available since 1995. It used to be mentioned in two or three articles a year and surprisingly, the number of times that it was cited began to increase significantly in February 2014.
When they looked into the cause of this sudden increase, Carey and Filion saw that it was due to the publication of thirty-two meta-analysis studies (a type of analysis that combines the results from various studies on the same object) produced by twenty-eight apparently unrelated Chinese research groups based in different cities.
They were related to works that dealt with common diseases such as Crohn's disease, heart disease and cancer, but after careful analysis and comparison, they realized that these works had the same structure, aesthetics, order and values.
Carey and Filion concluded that the same author probably wrote all the CISCOM metanalyses. By investigating further, the researchers found that there are companies in China that produce this type of study professionally.
The authors state that "this research could be just the tip of the iceberg" and although they do not want to discredit the scientific work of Chinese colleagues, it c alls into question their good scientific practice. They added that those responsible for this malpractice are "both the authors and publishers who publish them".
Guillaume Filion published this study on his personal blog, and it was also included in ScienceInsider magazine on 14 October 2014.
Reference works:
Guillaume Filion (2014), "A floury of copycats on PubMed", [ Blog], 4th October.
Mara Hvistendahl (2014), "Copycat papers flag continuing headache in China", ScienceInsider, 14th October.