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closeThe problem may be even worse than that
Posted by AdamJacobs on 10 Jan 2013 at 15:05 GMT
This is a fascinating study. Research misconduct deserves to be taken seriously, and it's disappointing to see that policies for dealing with misconduct are not more widespread.
However, it could be even worse than that. Dishonest literature may result from research misconduct, but it may also result from editorial misconduct. I appreciate that policies for editorial misconduct was outside the scope of your study, but my guess is that if you had investigated it, you'd have found far fewer journals with policies for dealing with it.
I have written about my own experience of being on the wrong side of editorial misconduct in the following blogposts:
http://dianthus.co.uk/qui...
http://dianthus.co.uk/the...
I'm sure my experience is far from unique: it is not hard to find other articles about editorial misconduct. For example:
http://www.bmj.com/conten...
http://www.jpgmonline.com...
http://link.springer.com/...
http://www.healthnewsrevi...
So by all means, let's be concerned about how seriously journals take research misconduct, but let's also not forget that research misconduct is only part of the problem of dishonesty in biomedical publishing.