The European Journal of Public Health Advance Access originally published online on August 28, 2008
The European Journal of Public Health 2008 18(5):435; doi:10.1093/eurpub/ckn068
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Editorial |
Dangers of doing right things in a wrong place
Vasiliy V. VlassovMoscow Medical Academy
Correspondence: Vasiliy V. Vlassov, Department of Research Methodology, Moscow Medical Academy, Moscow, Russia. e-mail: vlassov{at}cochrane.ru
This story began in 2006, when Iain Chalmers, discussing the obligation of authors of systematic reviews to detect plagiarism, used the example of plagiarizer Asim Kurjak from Croatia.1 Journal editors who were confronted with plagiarism developed methods of handling cases of plagiarism years ago, and more general regulations in relation to research misconduct were prepared.2 In the Croatian case, some journals did what they ought to do: the Croatian Medical Journal (CMJ) checked all publications by A. Kurjak, found duplicate publications and marked them as retracted in MEDLINE. Now of 252 publications by A. Kurjak as they appear in MEDLINE only 2 articles retracted by CMJ are marked as ‘retracted’. It is the visible tip of an iceberg of plagiarism.
Unfortunately, the Dean of the Zagreb School of Medicine did not react sharply against the plagiarizer, but against the CMJ editors. The Council of the Medical School delayed the hearings of the Kurjak case as long as possible, and downplayed it as much as possible. The Croatian Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports, the Rector of the Zagreb University—all stayed aside, and the case was closed without necessary scrutiny when A. Kurjak retired. At the end the Chief Editor of the CMJ, Matko Marusic, was attacked for speaking in public about the problems of the Medical School which this case revealed. Some details of the attack to the CMJ editors are given in an editorial in the medical journal in Croatia.3 The effect of these attacks is to destroy the best CMJ (as proven by independent reviews and citation reports), and to personally damage its respected editors, whose development of a state-of-the-art general medical journal in a very short time period is unprecedented.
The story is not closed yet. One can predict that the attacks to the editorial independence of the CMJ will continue, because all the previous actions more and more exposed the problems of the Zagreb Medical School. These are in no way specific for this medical school. Groups of ‘reputable medical professionals’ rule professional schools in many post-communist countries, chairing medical schools for 20 years and more. Plagiarism cases open from time to time everywhere, but particularly in former Soviet countries the only reaction of the ‘elite’ is to cover them up.4,5
The best indicator of absence of attention to research misconduct is absence of an entity devoted to the control of research misconduct. In many post-communist countries, there is no such body in any funding organization, government, university or academy of sciences. Moreover, there is no regulation of potential conflicts of interest in state bodies and in universities. For example, in Russia the owner of a drug company sits in the Parliamentary committee on health care, and a tobacco official presented Russia officially at the international conference on tobacco control.
New information technology gives new possibilities to study plagiarism, and it shows what we knew for a long time before—plagiarism is prevalent. We may hope that the rational use of this instrument may help to control this undesirable behavior. But this will happen only in a healthy atmosphere. The situation in Croatia is probably going to be better. This hope is based on the appearance in Croatia of new democratic mechanisms, an Office of Research Integrity at the Parliament.6 This office was created recently with the intention to study cases of research misconduct and to promote good research practice. It had an important say in the Kurjak case. These new movements in society, and brave people oriented to democracy and open society, need the support from the international scientific community. The attack on the CMJ is a reason for concern of the European public health research community, and an Office of Research Integrity should be established everywhere as a safeguard against plagiarism and other forms of research misconduct.
References
1 Chalmers I. Role of systematic reviews in detecting plagiarism: case of Asim Kurjak. Brit Med J (2006) 333:594–96.
2 Office of Research Integrity. Handling Misconduct. Available at: http://ori.dhhs.gov/misconduct/ (date last accessed 15 April 2008).
3 Marusic M, Marusic A. Threats to the integrity of the Croatian Medical Journal. In: Croat Med J (2007) 48:779–785. (http://www.cmj.hr/2008/49/1/18293450.htm).[Medline]
4 Zawadszki ZA, Abbasi K. Polish plagiarism scandal unearthed. Brit Med J (1998) 316:645.
5 Vlasov VV. Emerging problems of medical ethics in Russia: medical practice and research. Kardiologiia (2002) 42:81–4.[Medline]
6 Puljak L. Croatia founded a national body for ethics in science. Sci Eng Ethics (2007) 13:191–3.[CrossRef][Web of Science][Medline]
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||