National Institutes of Health, Office of Intramural Research and Medical Science and Computing, Bethesda, USA.
National Institutes of Health, Office of Intramural Research, Bethesda, USA.
Sci Eng Ethics. 2022 Jul 7;28(4):31. doi: 10.1007/s11948-022-00386-1.
In the last 20 years, there has been a sharp increase in the incidence of retractions of articles published in scientific journals, the majority of which are due to research misconduct. In some cases, researchers have revised and republished articles that were retracted due to misconduct, which raises some novel questions concerning authorship. Suppose that an article is retracted because one of the authors fabricated or falsified some data, but the researchers decide to salvage the useable data, make appropriate revisions, and resubmit the article for publication. If the person who committed misconduct has made a significant contribution to the research reported in the revised paper, should they be named as an author to recognize this contribution or should they be denied authorship because they committed misconduct? This is a challenging issue because it involves the confluence of two research ethics domains that are usually dealt with separately, i.e., resolution of authorship disputes and adjudication of misconduct findings, as well as potential conflicts among norms that underlie authorship practices and misconduct adjudication. In this paper, we (1) describe some actual cases involving articles that were retracted for misconduct and republished; (2) review policies from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, Committee on Publication Ethics, and top fifteen biomedical journals to determine whether they provide adequate guidance for cases like these; and (3) analyze the ethical and policy issues that may arise in these situations.
在过去的 20 年中，科学期刊发表的文章被撤回的数量急剧增加，其中大多数是由于研究不端行为。在某些情况下，研究人员会修改并重新发表因不当行为而被撤回的文章，这就提出了一些关于作者身份的新问题。假设一篇文章因其中一位作者捏造或伪造了一些数据而被撤回，但研究人员决定利用可利用的数据，进行适当的修改，并重新提交该文章进行发表。如果犯有不当行为的人对修订后的论文所报告的研究做出了重大贡献，是否应该将其命名为作者以承认这一贡献，还是应该因他们犯有不当行为而剥夺其作者身份？这是一个具有挑战性的问题，因为它涉及到通常分别处理的两个研究伦理领域的融合，即解决作者身份争议和不当行为裁决，以及作者身份实践和不当行为裁决所依据的规范之间的潜在冲突。在本文中，我们（1）描述了一些涉及因不当行为而被撤回并重新发表的文章的实际案例；（2）审查了国际医学期刊编辑委员会、出版伦理委员会和前十五名生物医学期刊的政策，以确定它们是否为这类案例提供了充分的指导；（3）分析了这些情况下可能出现的伦理和政策问题。
