Serious stuff! What about other areas of medical research?
"Over the past decade, stroke researchers have scrambled to identify any drug that can help mitigate brain injury in the crucial first days after a subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), a dangerous and often fatal condition caused by a ruptured aneurism. In rodents, scientists have reported success with hundreds of agents, from old cancer drugs to curcumin and fish oil. But few of those made it into human trials. Yesterday in PLOS Biology, Dutch scientists laid out a case that fraud may be to blame for at least some of that discrepancy , finding a shocking 40% of more than 600 rodent studies of early brain injury following SAH contained manipulated, duplicated, or otherwise suspect images.
Neurosurgery researcher[s] ... initially set out to conduct a systematic literature review in the hopes of identifying the best neuroprotective drug candidates—only to end up interrogating the evidence base instead. “If there’s 600 papers that all describe these great, amazing, promising therapies, it just doesn’t make sense that there’s nothing yet in the clinic,” ...
“We have seen great progress made in systems of ICU care and endovascular treatments, but almost no change in the pharmacological management,” he said. The only approved therapy in the U.S. is nimodipine, which has been used since 1988 to keep brain blood vessels from constricting. ...
The team began posting their queries on PubPeer, resulting in corrections for over a fifth of the papers; 19 have been retracted.
The questionable papers, published in major journals as well as obscure ones, traced back to a group of authors that often published together. Nearly 90% had a corresponding author affiliated with a Chinese institution, and many of the images were recycled from paper to paper. In June, the neuroscience website The Transmitter reported that a U.S. stroke researcher highly represented on the flagged papers, John H. Zhang, had had his data sequestered by his institution, Loma Linda University, as part of an in-house inquiry that is still ongoing. ...
the findings should come as a relief to any researcher who has tried and failed to replicate the results of rodent studies in SAH. ..."
From the abstract:
"Scientific progress relies on science’s capacity for self-correction. If erroneous articles remain unchallenged in the publication record, they can mislead future research and undermine evidence-based decision-making.
All articles included in a systematic review of animal studies on early brain injury after subarachnoid hemorrhage were analyzed for image-related issues.
We included 608 articles, of which 243 articles were identified as problematic (40.0%).
Of the 243 problematic articles,
55 (22.6%) have been corrected,
7 (2.9%) have received an expression of concern,
5 (2.1%) were marked with the Taylor & Francis under investigation pop-up, and 19 (7.8%) were retracted.
In 9 of the 55 corrected articles (16.4%), new problems were found after correction or not all issues were resolved in the correction.
Most (n = 213, 87.7%) problematic articles had a corresponding author affiliated to an institute from China. Our results show that the self-correcting mechanisms in science have stalled in this field of research. Our findings provide insight in the prevalence of image-related issues and can help publishers to take appropriate action. We can only uphold science’s capacity for self-correction when problematic articles are actively identified by peers, and when publishers take swift and adequate action to repair the scientific record."
Fig 2. Number of included articles per publication year [separated by problematic and non-problematic articles].
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