fraud, forgery, and fake news in the medical literature forgeries fo… · fraud, forgery, and fake...

FRAUD, FORGERY, AND FAKE NEWS IN THE MEDICAL LITERATURE

DAVID MASLOVE, MD, MS, FRCPCQUEEN’S UNIVERSITY

KINGSTON, ONTARIO, CANADA

Critical Care Canada ForumNovember 13, 2019

@DavidMaslove

david.maslove@queensu.ca

DISCLOSURES

•Financial - none•Other - Associate Editor at Critical Care Medicine

•(views are my own)

Who can you trust?

What is “true”?

THE CHANGING MEDIA LANDSCAPE

THE CHANGING MEDIA LANDSCAPE

MEDICAL

THE CHANGING MEDIA LANDSCAPE

MEDICAL

PEER REVIEW

PEER REVIEW

PREDATORY JOURNALS

PREPRINTS

PREDATORY JOURNALS

“PREPRINTS”

WHAT IS A PREDATORY JOURNAL?1. The journal’s operations are deceptive

2. Not in keeping with best practices (eg.

COPE)

3. Low transparency regarding operations

4. Promotes fake impact factors

5. No retraction policy

6. Contact details not easily verifiable

7. “Look and feel” of being unprofessional

8. Solicits manuscripts through aggressive

emailsCukier et al. Defining predatory journals and responding to the threat they pose: a

modified Delphi consensus process. medRxiv Nov 2, 2019.

Tom Spears,

Ottawa

Citizen

Tom Spears,

Ottawa

Citizen

Open Access Publishing

Predatory Journals

1. Is it a predator or legit

Open Access?

2. Probably bad for science

3. Could be bad for your

career

PEER REVIEW

PREDATORY JOURNALS

PREPRINTS

PREPRINTS

PREPRINTS

Room for debate

1. By definition preprints are not peer

reviewed

2. Medicine ≠ Physics

3. Do preprints have to look like peer

reviewed articles?

4. Likely to end up in citations

PREPRINTS

Maslove DM. Medical preprints – A debate worth having. JAMA 2018.

PREDATORY JOURNALS

“PREPRINTS”

WHAT IS A PREDATORY JOURNAL?1. The journal’s operations are deceptive

2. Not in keeping with best practices (eg.

COPE)

3. Low transparency regarding operations

4. Promotes fake impact factors

5. No retraction policy

6. Contact details not easily verifiable

7. “Look and feel” of being unprofessional

8. Solicits manuscripts through aggressive

emailsCukier et al. Defining predatory journals and responding to the threat they pose: a

modified Delphi consensus process. medRxiv Nov 2, 2019. PREPRINT!

“Safety Checks”1. Authors must show evidence of

ethics approval, consent2. Authors must disclose funding

sources3. Submissions are screened by an

external clinical scientist and and a clinical editor

4. If concerns in screening, paper is escalated to a clinical editor

5. Final decision could be made by six-person management team

“All manuscripts are screened on submission for plagiarism, non-scientific content, inappropriate article types, and material that could potentially endanger the health of individual patients or the public.”

Bias

Quality

Agenda

Fraud

Important!…but not iron-clad.

PEER REVIEW

“…democracy is the worst form of government except for all those

other forms that have been tried from time to time…”

—Sir Winston Churchill

PEER REVIEW

publishing

Peer review

The Takeaway

The landscape of biomedical publishing is changing

(rapidly), introducing new threats to the validity,

integrity, and trustworthiness of medical research (and

by extension, practice). This has direct and immediate

implications for all of us, and all of our patients.

“And with that I’ll take some questions”

QUESTIONS & COMMENTS

david.maslove@queensu.ca

@DavidMaslove

An online community of peer-review enthusiasts.

The Golden Rule of Peer Review

“For every manuscript you submit, accept (at least) one peer review invitation*”

* Also you never know when you might get invited to write an editorial

The Takeaway

Scrutinize science without undermining public trust

vs.

How anti-vaxxers do

statistics:

If you have 4 pencils and I

have 7 apples, how many

pancakes will fit on the roof?

Purple, because aliens don’t

wear hats.

vs

• Walking a tightrope. We need to be skeptical of fake

news in the medical literature (and in the lay literature),

without causing panic and sowing distrust among the

public in the enterprise of medical science. There’s

enough of this as it is (see anti-vax). It’s critical we get

things right so that we can point to an air-tight process

when dealing with the public.

N.B. there’s good correlation between Petit tightrope walking between towers and the fate of those buildings, but probably not causal

The Takeaway

•Watch out for phishing

attempts

•Watch who you’re citing

•Consider how your

analysis is conducted and

reported

•Keep up with emerging

tools and trends

•You can’t outsource critical

appraisal

•Consider the source, consider

the peer review, consider the

conflicts of interest (and of

course, consider the merits of

the study)

•It’s a lot more work, isn’t it?!

For Producers For Consumers

Anyone can read*

*Provided you’ve paid the subscription fee

º37% profit margin

Publisher 2017 Revenue

Elsevier US$ 3.2 billionº

Springer Nature US$ 1.9 billion

Wiley US$ 1.7 billion

Eddy TD. Plan-S: Motivations of for-profit publishers.

Science 1 FEBRUARY 2019 • VOL 363 ISSUE 6426

Elise H. Nature. 04 SEPT 2018

20% OF PAPERS ARE PUBLISHED OPEN ACCESS.THIS ILLUSTRATES THE WILLINGNESS OF AUTHORS TO PAY TO HAVE THEIR WORK PUBLISHED.

SOME HAVE RECOGNIZED THIS AS A BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY…