Panel recommends changes at Science

In wake of Hwang scandal, report suggests journal should apply extra scrutiny to papers likely to garner lots of public attention

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Science should revamp its review process to help prevent research fraud, according to a report from a panel of outside experts made public yesterday (November 28). The group recommended that the journal create a procedure for flagging papers that need extra scrutiny and demand more information about individual authors' contributions to each paper, among other measures.The independent assessment committee was convened by Science earlier this year after the journal retracted work by Hwang Woo-suk in which the South Korean researcher fraudulently claimed to be able to produce human embryonic stem cells from adult cells. The committee wrote that Science's editors followed the journal's procedures in reviewing the research, but that the current process, based on trust, is inadequate to deal with cases of intentional deception.The committee recommended four key changes, including implementation of a formal risk-assessment procedure to "explicitly ask questions about the probability that the work might be intentionally deceptive." As part of the procedure, papers likely to garner a great deal of public attention should get extra scrutiny, the report states.Science should also develop a procedure for clarifying each author's specific contribution to a paper; increase the information made available as part of the published supporting material for papers; and work to establish common standards with other journals, the panel advised.Donald Kennedy, Science's editor-in-chief, said during a conference call with the media yesterday that he found the report "very thoughtful and intelligent," but that the journal is still reviewing the recommendations and has yet to officially decide whether and how to implement them.Change often comes at a price, Kennedy cautioned. "There will be social costs associated with the loss of the tradition of trust, and we need to ask ourselves whether interventions in the interest of detecting falsification might not be costing the system more than the occasional retraction would," he said. Nonetheless, Kennedy suggested that the journal would probably adopt the recommendations in some form. Regarding the risk-assessment component, he said the editors would likely ask themselves the following questions to determine whether a paper needs extra scrutiny: "Is it a highly unexpected or counterintuitive result that would be likely to break a new path in a whole field of science? Does it bear significantly on a reasonably hot set of possible policy choices, as would be the case for a paper in the field of stem cells, or for a paper on climate change? Has it already attracted a great deal of external attention that would make it a matter of especially intense public interest?"Another issue raised during the conference call was whether papers from outside the US should be considered in need of extra care because language barriers and cultural differences can make fraud harder to detect. Kennedy noted that the review of the Hwang research was complicated by these factors."On the other hand, we donin't want to engage in profiling," he said. "It would really be unfair if we started looking extra hard at papers from emerging scientific powers in countries like South Korea."Kennedy said he expects the number of papers falling into the high-risk category would be relatively small, "perhaps 10 a year or less." The special attention given to such papers would likely include more demands for original data and original images, among other things. "We'll be working these procedures out and will seek commentary from the scientific community as we do so," he noted.The initial response from some members of the scientific community was not entirely positive. "I disagree with the recommendation that ?papers that are likely to have high visibility... should get special scrutiny,'" Mike Rossner, managing editor of the Journal of Cell Biology, told The Scientist in an email. "I think that the same standards for data integrity should be applied to all manuscripts."Christine Laine, senior deputy editor of Annals of Internal Medicine, said the policy would be difficult to put into practice. "It's really hard to see how you would identify which papers need increased scrutiny," she told The Scientist. "It seems like no matter what criteria you set, when you tried to implement it, it would just come down to anything that you see as suspicious."Addressing the issue of clarifying coauthors' roles, Kennedy said he expects the journal to adopt the recommendation, but that it is not yet clear whether the information would be published as part of the paper. In extreme cases, it might take "an extra couple of pages...and pages cost us money, so we've got to be a little bit reasonable about how much we do," he said.Science may also institute a policy requiring all coauthors to "assert that they have read the manuscript and are prepared to take responsibility for it in its final form," Kennedy said.Laine said such measures are already in place at Annals of Internal Medicine and other top-tier clinical journals. "The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors and the Council of Science Editors both recommend that the criteria for authorship include being involved in the actual drafting of the paper or critical revision of the paper, and that every author must sign off on the final copy of the paper," she pointed out. Even if the committee's recommendations were to be consistently implemented, it's unrealistic to think that they could wipe out fraud, Richard Rothenberg, editor-in-chief of the Annals of Epidemiology and a member of the World Association of Medical Editors' editorial policy committee, told The Scientist. "The [independent assessment] committee pointed out a couple of things that might have been done a little bit better, but those were not very impressive," he said, adding that an "irreducible minimum" of fraud is "part of the price of doing business" in a high-pressure field, especially because the lure of great financial gain can be a corrupting force."I think trying to protect against it by tightening the screws and just doing more of the same is an exercise in futility," he said.In fact, although the recommendations were drafted in response to the Hwang scandal, Kennedy said during the conference call that they would have been unlikely to prevent the disaster. "I don't think that the procedures that we've been discussing so far would necessarily have caused us not to publish or to seriously doubt the publishability of those papers," he said.The seven-member committee was chaired by John I. Brauman, the J. G. Jackson-C. J. Wood Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University, who also chairs Science's senior editorial board. Committee members included the Harvard chemist George Whitesides and Johns Hopkins' John Gearhart, a pioneer in the isolation and culturing of human stem cells. The panel reviewed an extensive paper trail on the Hwang case, Brauman said during the conference call. Brauman agreed with Kennedy that the recommendations are far from a panacea, but stressed that they could be helpful nonetheless. "None of us think that all fraud can be detected, but we do believe that it can be deterred."Kate Fodor kfodor@the-scientist.comLinks within this article:Independent assessment committee report http://www.sciencemag.org/sciext/hwang2005/314_5804_1353_DC1.pdfS. Pincock, "Hwang requests Science retraction," The Scientist, Dec. 16, 2005 http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/22864/I. Oransky, "All Hwang human cloning work fraudulent," The Scientist, Jan. 10, 2006 http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/22933S. Shafir and D. Kennedy, "Research Misconduct: Media Exaggerate Results of a Survey," The Scientist, June 22, 1998 http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/18103M. Rossner, "How to Guard Against Image Fraud," The Scientist, March 1, 2006 http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/23156/International Committee of Medical Journal Editors http://www.icmje.orgCouncil of Science Editors http://www.councilscienceeditors.org/World Association of Medical Editors http://www.wame.org/index.htmJohn I. Brauman http://www.stanford.edu/dept/chemistry/faculty/braumanGeorge Whitesides http://gmwgroup.harvard.edu/people_biography.htmlR. Lewis, "John Gearhart: Stem Cell Guru," The Scientist, Dec. 9, 2002 http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/13440
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