科技日报记者聂翠蓉全文剽窃纽约时报文章



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送交者: JZ 于 2005-12-29, 00:40:27:

科技日报12月29日发表了署名该报记者聂翠蓉的文章,题为《学术造假有全球化趋势》。该文全文(有删节地)译自纽约时报12月20日发表的由LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN和WILLIAM J. BROAD撰写的文章《Global Trend: More Science, More Fraud》。

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科技日报:学术造假有全球化趋势

本报记者 聂翠蓉

  最近发生在韩国科学家黄禹锡身上的造假丑闻,对全球科学界震动很大。美国专家近日表示,这一科学丑闻说明,在科研论文数量呈爆炸性增长的今天,现有的论文造假和欺诈行为防范机制已经难以胜任。随着科研项目和出版科研论文相关杂志的急剧增加,科学家造假问题会越来越严重。

  三重防卫体系仍难杜绝

  为了将欺诈性研究和对人类有害的研究论文挡在门外,美国的一些科学类杂志建立了三重安全防卫体系。

  首先是由权威专家评估,为政府提供是否给该项目资金支持的建议。

  第二是仲裁体系。杂志社请权威评审专家研读论文,判断相关研究成果是否有出版价值。

  最后是答辩阶段,请一些立场中立的科学家一起研究相关成果是否可以作为同行业研究的代表性成果,从而决定能否发表。

  但是,自上世纪七八十年代以来,一些重大科技丑闻时有发生,严重动摇了科学界对这三重防卫体系的信心,他们不明白,20多年来美国虽然不断修订和增加各种新法律与官方调查团体,为什么仍有大量不正当科学行为频频发生。

  诚然,世界大多数科学家能够抵抗诱惑,坚守科学规范,视真理高于一切,但调查显示,不法出版和伪造行为仍是一股很大的暗流。

  美国明尼苏达大学对3427位科学家的一个调查统计表明,近1/3的科学家承认,从忽视研究中相互矛盾的事实到伪造数据,自己存在着这样或那样的问题。

  近20年来卷入科学造假事件之中的,大多数是世界级著名杂志和著名大学的科学家。1981年,科学界还认为“我们不需要制定防范论文欺诈的政策,科学有自我纠正的能力”。但一件又一件的科技造假事件说明,科学其实对此无能为力。

  上世纪80年代初,年轻的心脏病学研究人员约翰·达西被发现在100多篇公开发表的论文中编造了大量数据,而且这些论文大部分发表在《新英格兰医学杂志》、《美国科学院期刊》和《美国心脏病学杂志》等知名期刊上,影响非常恶劣。

  这一事件后,美国政府开始采取措施,现有的防范政策也是在那时相继出炉的。例如,国会通过了一项法律,要求公立和私人研究机构建立一套完整的工作流程,有能力对科研欺诈行为进行调查,评估实验数据、纯化科研氛围,并保护正直人士的清白。政府还成立了独立的调查机构即“研究诚信办公室”,专门负责调查和处理那些由美国政府资助的研究项目中的不诚实行为,并随时公布违规者的姓名、单位、违规情节和处置决定。

  经常被卷入其中的各大杂志社也采取了行动。1997年,论文出版道德规范委员会成立,专门负责处理各种违背研究和出版规范的事件。委员会有来自欧洲、亚洲和美国的300多位成员,大多是医学杂志的编辑。

  论文造假频发的两大原因

  大多数专家认为,这种越来越糟的论文造假行为,除了因为科研项目爆炸性增加外,还应归咎于大多数国家没有采取防范措施。

  出于自我保护的目的,各国防范学术造假的措施大相径庭,有的国家甚至根本没有防范措施,所以,在一个国家杜绝造假事件已相当困难,处理国际间的造假问题更是难上加难。

  另一个原因是论文数目的剧增。据统计,今年全世界有5.4万多篇论文发表,这些剧增的论文足以困惑同行业的研究人员,冲击质量控制体系并扭曲公众对相关结果的理解。这些海量论文大多数根本没有被人阅读或引用过,有些作者只是为了职业晋升的需求而发表文章,有的公司为了提升自己的影响力,也作为产业策略鼓励员工们发表各种论文。

  现在,一些知名国际性杂志已经开始关注那些有问题的论文,并公开发表文章表达这种关注。

  例如,世界著名的BMJ系列电子期刊共有26种,主要涉及药学、临床、卫生与健康等领域。今年7月30日,它在自己的刊物上发表了4篇论述学术造假的文章,并在封面醒目位置上刊登出“质疑医学研究中的弄虚作假:谁应站出来调查?”的大标题。文章分析了加拿大和印度两国科研造假的案例和杜绝造假的障碍、杂志在刊登造假文章的道路上越走越远的原因。文章认为,杂志社在刊登论文之前,必须由国家级调查机构和专业协会协助审核论文,但这些国家要么没有这种机构,要么这种机构不愿出面去做这种事。

  刊登了黄禹锡论文的美国《科学》杂志12月14日曾发表声明说:“我们自己没有调查机构,所以只能等待论文作者的回复和官方调查结果,然后向公众公布我们的意见。到目前为止,我们不能表示我们的谴责。”一些科学家也建议,为了提高可信度,韩国调查团应该吸纳行业外人士和外国同行业专家进入调查组,只有这样,调查结果才能保持其客观公正性。

  本来,在今年的各大科技期刊年终专稿中,黄禹锡占有重要的一席之地,例如在《科学美国人》杂志年度50位风云人物中,黄禹锡本来榜上有名,但最近该杂志不得不刊登声明,从名单上撤掉了黄禹锡并因此向读者道歉。

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New York Times: Global Trend: More Science, More Fraud

By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN and WILLIAM J. BROAD

Published: December 20, 2005

The South Korean scandal that shook the world of science last week is just one sign of a global explosion in research that is outstripping the mechanisms meant to guard against error and fraud.

Experts say the problem is only getting worse, as research projects, and the journals that publish the findings, soar.

Science is often said to bar dishonesty and bad research with a triple safety net. The first is peer review, in which experts advise governments about what research to finance. The second is the referee system, which has journals ask reviewers to judge if manuscripts merit publication. The last is replication, whereby independent scientists see if the work holds up.

But a series of scientific scandals in the 1970's and 1980's challenged the scientific community's faith in these mechanisms to root out malfeasance. In response the United States has over the last two decades added extra protections, including new laws and government investigative bodies.

And as research around the globe has increased, most without the benefit of such safeguards, so have the cases of scientific misconduct. Most recently, suspicions have swirled around a dazzling series of cloning advances by a South Korean scientist, Dr. Hwang Woo Suk.

Dr. Hwang's research made him a national hero. His team outdid rivals by claiming to have extracted stem cells from cloned human embryos and to have cloned a dog, an extraordinary feat. Some observers hailed the breakthroughs as worthy of a Nobel Prize.

Last month, critics charged that Dr. Hwang's published findings hid ethical lapses. And last week, collaborators accused the researcher of fabricating results in one of his landmark human cloning studies, published in Science last spring.

Dr. Hwang has insisted on his innocence but said he would retract the Science paper. Now questions are growing about his earlier work, including Snuppy, the dog he claims to have cloned. Yesterday, news agencies reported that Seoul National University officials investigating Dr. Hwang's claims locked down his laboratory, impounded his computer and interviewed his colleagues, among other actions.

"The Korean case shows us that we should be a lot more cautious," Marcel C. LaFollette, the author of "Stealing Into Print: Fraud, Plagiarism, and Misconduct in Scientific Publishing," said in an interview. "We have been unwilling to ask tough questions of people who are from other countries and whose systems are different because we were attempting to be polite."

To be sure, most scientists resist pressures to cut corners and adhere to the canons of science, honoring the truth above all else. But surveys suggest that there are powerful undercurrents of misbehavior and, in some cases, outright fakery.

In June, a survey of 3,427 scientists by the University of Minnesota and the HealthPartners Research Foundation reported that up to a third of the respondents had engaged in ethically questionable practices, from ignoring contradictory facts to falsifying data.

Scientific fraud as a public danger burst into public view in the 1970's and 1980's, when major cases of misconduct shook a number of elite publications and institutions, including Yale, Harvard and Columbia.

In 1981, Dr. Donald Fredrickson, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, defended the standard view of science as a self-correcting enterprise. "We deliberately have a very small police force because we know that poor currency will automatically be discovered and cast out," he said.

But fraud after fraud made the weaknesses of that system impossible to ignore. In the early 1980's, a young cardiology researcher, Dr. John R. Darsee, was found to have fabricated much data for more than 100 papers he wrote while working at Harvard and Emory Universities. His work appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and The American Journal of Cardiology, among other top publications.

Startled, the federal government, beginning in 1985, took steps to augment the existing safeguards. For instance, Congress passed a law requiring public and private institutions to establish formal ways to investigate charges of fraud, in theory helping to assess damage, clear the air and protect the innocent. Eventually, the federal government established its own investigative body, now known by the Orwellian title of the Office of Research Integrity.

Journal editors, at the center of the storm, also took collective action to enhance their credibility. In 1997, they founded the Committee on Publication Ethics, or COPE, "to provide a sounding board for editors who are struggling with how to best deal with possible breaches in research and publication ethics," according to the group's Web site.

Consisting mostly of editors of medical journals, the committee now has more than 300 members in Europe, Asia and the United States.

Still, the frauds kept coming. In 1999, federal investigators found that a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., faked what had been hailed as crucial evidence linking power lines to cancer. He published his research in The Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences and F.E.B.S. Letters, a journal of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies.

The year 2002 proved especially bleak. At Bell Labs, a series of extraordinary claims that seemed destined to win a Nobel Prize, including the creation of molecular-scale transistors, suddenly collapsed. Two of the world's most prestigious journals, Science and Nature, had published many of the fraudulent papers, underscoring the need for better safeguards despite two decades of attempted repairs.

Experts now say that the explosive growth of science around the globe has made the problem far worse, because most countries have yet to institute the extra measures that the United States has put in place. That imbalance is at least partly responsible for a rise in scientific scandals in other countries, they say.

Dr. Richard S. Smith, a former editor of The British Medical Journal (now BMJ) and the co-founder of the Committee on Publication Ethics, a group of journal editors, said in an interview that fraud was becoming increasingly difficult to root out because most countries' protective measures were either patchy or altogether absent. "It's hard enough to do something nationally, and to do it internationally is still harder," he said. "But that's what is needed."

Contributing to the problem is a drastic rise in the number of scientific journals published around the world: more than 54,000, according to Ulrich's Periodicals Directory. This glut can confuse researchers, overwhelm quality-control systems, encourage fraud and distort the public perception of findings.

"Foreign scientific journals have gone through the roof," said Shawn Chen, a senior associate editor at Ulrich's, nearly doubling to 29,098 in 2005 from 15,300 in 1980. "We're having a hard time keeping up."

While millions of articles are never read or cited - and some are written simply to pad résumés - others enter the pressure cooker of scientific and biomedical promotion, becoming lucrative elements of companies' business strategies.

Until now, cases of questionable research in other countries have gotten little attention in the United States. But international editors, shaken by scandal, are now publicizing them and expressing concern. This year, the July 30 issue of BMJ devoted four articles to the subject, asking on its cover: "Suspicions of fraud in medical research: Who should investigate?"

The articles discussed cases in which several publications, including BMJ, had stumbled in resolving serious doubts about the truthfulness of published studies done in Canada and India. The Canadian research claimed that a patented mix of multivitamins improved brain function in older people, and the Indian study said that low-fat, high-fiber diets cut by nearly half the risk of death from heart disease.

The BMJ said that it published its own version of the Indian research in April 1992 and that it had later investigated serious questions about the validity of the research for more than a decade before speaking out.

The difficulty, the editors said, was that journals could go only so far in fraud inquiries before needing the aid of national investigative bodies and professional associations that oversee scientific research. But in the Indian and Canadian cases, they added, such bodies either did not exist or refused to help, so "the doubts are unresolved."

The journal's editors, Dr. Fiona Godlee and Dr. Jane Smith, noted that the United States and Scandinavian countries had adopted institutional defenses and that Britain was considering such safeguards. Journals have an obligation to help the process, they concluded, by publicizing their difficulties and doubts.

Most recently, the South Korean uproar illustrates the tangle of publishing and policing issues that can arise as science becomes increasingly competitive and international.

"Now we're in a situation where we have these alliances between university researchers in countries and between institutions that really weren't working together before," said Dr. LaFollette, author of "Stealing Into Print."

The journal Science, owned by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, published the research of Dr. Hwang of Seoul National University and his colleagues in March 2004 and June 2005, hailing it as pathbreaking.

On Dec. 14, the magazine noted in a statement how fraud charges about the 2005 research had led to two investigations - one in South Korea and the other at the University of Pittsburgh, home to one of the article's 25 co-authors. "The journal itself is not an investigative body," Donald Kennedy, the magazine's editor, argued. "We await answers from the authors, as well as official conclusions, before we come to any ourselves."

On Friday in a news conference, Dr. Kennedy emphasized that the magazine had made no accusations of fraud against Dr. Hwang. "As of now we can't reach any conclusions with respect to misconduct issues," he said.

Independent scientists said it remained to be seen how thoroughly authorities in South Korea, where Dr. Hwang is a celebrity, would investigate the case and resolve knotty issues in what amounts to a highly public test of institutional maturity.

Seoul National University is leading the inquiry. Its committee, which apparently has the authority to examine Dr. Hwang's raw data and to question his colleagues, may have the best chance of discovering how much of his work remains valid.

But experts also cautioned that the committee's credibility requires the addition of outsiders, and perhaps scientists from other countries, who know the field and can help ensure that the investigation will retain its objectivity.

"Unfortunately, individual institutions have an enormous conflict of interest," said Dr. Smith, the former editor of The British Medical Journal. "It's a lot easier," he said, for such bodies when examining an allegation of fraud on their own, "to slide someone out of the organization or to suppress it altogether."



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