When the Research is Lying (Who Knew??)

I did! And, it makes me sad. Well, really more annoyed than sad.

The article linked in the title is pretty old (May 2007), but something happened recently that made me think of it.

While the topic of the article linked in the title is really about plagiarism in publishing and direct falsification of data, I've experienced more insidious ethical issues, as I'm sure many people have. Direct lying in a paper or about data is ridiculous, but it apparently happens fairly often:

"About 1 per cent of clinical trials are thought to be suspect."

And, that's just clinical trials. I wonder if they count different kinds of 'playing with the data'. One lab I know of, for example, falsified or 'fixed' (in their words) reliability data. I reported it to the department, but I doubt anything ever actually happened.

The reason I was thinking of it was because I was googling my name looking for an old website, and a conference presentation came up where I was listed as 3rd author. I was listed as an author for research that I didn't really participate in for a presentation that happened over 1.5 years after I left that lab. The 2nd author on it had never heard of it either. We were just stuck on there for mysterious reasons for research that I left because of what I considered to be unethical data collection practices. Now, my name pops up in connection with that lab whenever you run an article search in a database. And, it makes me mad. The 1st author probably thought she was doing me a favor. Bah. Where does one go to report that??

posted by Sarah @ 6:31 PM