Scientific dishonesty: European reflections

Scientific dishonesty has attracted increased attention around the world du ring the past three to four decades. Europe became aware of the problem lat er than the USA, but has within the past 10 years created national control systems for all biomedical projects, not only those supported by public mon ey. The prevalence of the problem can only be calculated indirectly by refe rring to population figures as denominators. Measured this way, figures fro m Denmark as a whole show: 1-2 cases referred/million inhabitants/year, 1 c ase treated/million inhabitants(year, 1 case of scientific dishonesty/milli on inhabitants/5 years. For Finland, 1-2 cases were referred/million inhabi tants/1-2 years; for Norway, similar figures of 1/4 million inhabitants/yea r were calculated. Figures from the Danish national independent control bod y 1993-7 show the distribution of the types of cases that were charged, wit h numbers of confirmed cases in parentheses: fabrication, 2 (1); plagiarism , 3 (0); theft, 2 (0); ghost authorship, 2 (I); false methodological descri ption, 3 (1); twisted statistics, 2 (0); suppression of existing data, 4 (0 ); unwarranted use of data, 4 (0); and authorship problems, 8 (1). This sur vey emphasis the need for national guidelines, an independent national cont rol body, and initiatives for strong preventive actions.