Chalmers study shows how to discover research misconduct

Baraa Khuder lets her students analyse retracted articles to learn how to recognise research misconduct, and it was then a surprising pattern emerged. Five rhetorical red flags emerged that can uncover research misconduct in an early stage:

• Problems in how references are used. Cited articles are irrelevant or used in a misleading way.
• Unclarities in methodology.
• Rhetorical inconsistencies, such as between figures and conclusion.
• Rhetorical exaggeration, too confidently claiming the significance of the findings.
• Inconsistent or incorrect use of terminology.

Baraa Khuder recognises these signs from her work as journal editor and reviewer. However, she says, they are not a confirmation of that something is wrong, but rather an indication of that further investigation is needed. She hopes the study will make more researchers ponder over these issues.
– The way I see it, I think every person in academia need to have at least some level of knowledge of research misconduct. The first step is to train the next generation of researchers, especially PhD students, to identify and investigate integrity issues.

This feeling of a shared responsibility is what caused her to bring research malpractice into her class for PhD students, which is about writing for publication. Because bad science can kill, says Baraa Khuder, and she means that literally.
– The paper that we bring in the classroom is a paper from 1998. It was a fabricated study that resulted in the death in children, it was about vaccination. Then there were riots in the US, parents stopped vaccinating their children, children started dying… It was all because of a paper.

Baraa Khuder argues that the system is the root cause of the rising problem of research malpractice. In a world where promotions are based on quantity rather than quality, everyone is responsible, she says.
– We better all take responsibility to some degree, because we have also fed the system.