Whitely W P, Rennie D, Hafner A W
Department of Information Analysis, American Medical Association, Chicago, Ill.
JAMA. 1994 Jul 13;272(2):170-3.
To determine whether scientists can detect fraudulent results in published research articles and to identify corrective measures that are most effective in purging fraudulent results from the literature.
Retrospective case-control study comparing articles by an author known to have published fraudulent articles, Robert A. Slutsky, MD, to a set of control articles. The number of non-self-citations received by each article during each calendar year (1979 through 1990) was counted. The citation numbers were transformed into scores. Each Slutsky article was assigned a score between 1 and 3 based on the number of citations received by the Slutsky article and each of its assigned control articles. Average citation numbers and scores were tracked for each year during the 11-year study period.
Before Slutsky's work was publicly questioned (1975 to 1985), scientists cited his articles as frequently as they cited control articles. After Slutsky's work was questioned and reports were published in the news media (1985), scientists cited his article less frequently than they cited control articles. Citations decreased further after the University of California-San Diego published a review of the validity of Slutsky's work in 1987. Citations did not decrease after the appearance of retractions in print or in MEDLINE.
Scientists do not, and probably cannot, identify published articles that are fraudulent. However, when alerted to the presence of fraudulent results in the literature, the scientific community responds by reducing the number of citations of the tainted articles. In the Slutsky case, general news articles and the three reviews published by the University of California-San Diego were most effective and retractions were least effective in purging fraudulent results from the literature.
确定科学家能否在已发表的研究文章中检测出欺诈性结果，并找出最有效地清除文献中欺诈性结果的纠正措施。
回顾性病例对照研究，将已知发表过欺诈性文章的作者罗伯特·A·斯卢茨基（医学博士）的文章与一组对照文章进行比较。统计了每篇文章在每个日历年（1979年至1990年）收到的非自引次数。将引用次数转换为分数。根据斯卢茨基文章及其每篇指定对照文章收到的引用次数，为每篇斯卢茨基文章分配1到3分。在为期11年的研究期间，每年跟踪平均引用次数和分数。
在斯卢茨基的研究受到公开质疑之前（1975年至1985年），科学家引用他的文章的频率与引用对照文章的频率相同。在斯卢茨基的研究受到质疑且新闻媒体发表相关报道后（1985年），科学家引用他的文章的频率低于引用对照文章的频率。1987年加利福尼亚大学圣地亚哥分校发表对斯卢茨基研究有效性的综述后，引用次数进一步下降。在印刷版或MEDLINE中出现撤稿后，引用次数并未下降。
科学家不会，也可能无法识别已发表的欺诈性文章。然而，当文献中出现欺诈性结果的警示时，科学界会通过减少对有问题文章的引用次数来做出回应。在斯卢茨基的案例中，一般新闻文章和加利福尼亚大学圣地亚哥分校发表的三篇综述在清除文献中欺诈性结果方面最有效，而撤稿的效果最差。
