Drummond Rennie, West Coast editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association and director of the AMA Congress, suggested that I examine the work of Stephen E. Breuning, the first researcher to have been convicted of scientific fraud in federal court. While at the Coldwater Regional Center for Developmental Disabilities, Michigan, and the University of Pittsburgh, Breuning published a number of studies from 1980 to 1984 on the use of drugs to control hyperactive retarded children, claiming that stimulant drugs were more effective and had fewer side effects than tranquilizers, the traditional drug therapy for retarded children. Experts in the field claim that Breuning's work was influential and led some states to change their policies on treating retarded children. But an investigation by the National Institute of Mental Health, initiated after a colleague challenged Breuning's work, concluded that he had not conducted the studies and had "knowingly, willfully, and ...
Citation Indexes Can Help Halt The Spread Of Fraudulent Research
Last May at the American Medical Association's International Congress on Peer Review in Biomedical Publication, I presented a report on the impact of fraud on scientific literature. Much of the current debate on this issue has focused on the small, but growing, number of papers reporting falsified research that escape the traditional quality control filter of peer review. But little attention has been paid to the question of whether and how these papers impact on research. This question is relev
Written byEugene Garfield
| 3 min read
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