Fraud and Misconduct in Medical Research

Abstract

During the last year we had observed different types of misconduct in the submitted manuscripts into the editorial office. Those are included attempted theft of data, presence of ghost authors, gift authorship, dual submissions, salami publications, falsification and some other types of fraud. Our analysis in the editorial office led us to conclude that research fraud is an important issue and should be discussed clearly. The emphasis on competition and pressure to produce published materials, while internal intention to discover the scientific truth may foster a conflict between personal career goals and human intellectual motivation finally may induce research misconduct. Having accurate and good knowledge in this field is mandatory for researchers especially the younger ones. In the first part of this article we will discuss a short but important part of the history of this problem and in the second part definition and editorial response will be reviewed. [ZJRMS , 2012 14(1): 1-7]