ReviewInternational journal of clinical oncology2016
Research misconduct and data fraud in clinical trials: prevalence and causal factors.
Review in International journal of clinical oncology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Retractions in Psychology and Psychiatry in Web of Science : A Bioethical Perspective.Journal of bioethical inquiry · 2026Review
- Identifying and mitigating bias in multiple aspects of modern clinical research.Communications medicine · 2026Review
- Lessons and Insights from a Case Study on Clinical Trial Fraud.Therapeutic innovation & regulatory science · 2026Article
- Navigating the ethical world of clinical researchers in China: challenges and pathways for improvement.BMC medical ethics · 2025Article
- The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- QR codes and international databases: promoting transparency in IRB approvals for medical research.The Libyan journal of medicine · 2024Article
- Article
- Assessing research misconduct in Iran: a perspective from Iranian medical faculty members.BMC medical ethics · 2021Article
- Explaining variance in perceived research misbehavior: results from a survey among academic researchers in Amsterdam.Research integrity and peer review · 2021Article
- Detecting fabrication in large-scale molecular omics data.PloS one · 2021Article
- Perceptions of occurrence of research misconduct and related factors among Kenyan investigators engaged in HIV research.Accountability in research · 2020Article
- Psychometric properties of Persian version of the research misconduct questionnaire (PRMQ).Journal of medical ethics and history of medicine · 2020Article
- Signaling the trustworthiness of science.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Criminalization of scientific misconduct.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2019Article
- Best practices in nutrition science to earn and keep the public's trust.The American journal of clinical nutrition · 2019Review
- Research misconduct and data fraud in clinical trials.International journal of clinical oncology · 2016Article
- Prevalence of data fraud.International journal of clinical oncology · 2016Article
- Legal and ethical issues in research.Indian journal of anaesthesia · 2016Review
- Fraud in clinical trials: complex problem, simple solutions?International journal of clinical oncology · 2016Article
- Assessment and classification of protocol deviations.Perspectives in clinical researchArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The disclosure of cases of research misconduct in clinical trials, conventionally defined as fabrication, falsification or plagiarism, has been a disturbingly common phenomenon in recent years. Such cases can potentially harm patients enrolled on the trials in question or patients treated based on the results of those trials and can seriously undermine the scientific and public trust in the validity of clinical trial results. Here, I review what is known about the prevalence of research misconduct in general and the contributing or causal factors leading to the misconduct. The evidence on prevalence is unreliable and fraught with definitional problems and with study design issues. Nevertheless, the evidence taken as a whole seems to suggest that cases of the most serious types of misconduct, fabrication and falsification (i.e., data fraud), are relatively rare but that other types of questionable research practices are quite common. There have been many individual, institutional and scientific factors proposed for misconduct but, as is the case with estimates of prevalence, reliable empirical evidence on the strength and relative importance of these factors is lacking. However, it seems clear that the view of misconduct as being simply the result of aberrant or self-delusional personalities likely underestimates the effect of other important factors and inhibits the development of effective prevention strategies.
Indexed as
Identifiers
26289019What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.