BMJ  2004;328:229 (24 January), doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7433.229-b

Letter

Britain's failure to tackle research misconduct

Britain is ahead of most countries

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—Lock warns the medical community about its lack of action in handling research misconduct.¹ We disagree that Britain lags behind the rest of the world and think that Lock should be proud of the achievements of the Anglo-Saxon countries. Fewer than 10, mostly small, countries have a national body for investigating misconduct and fraud in science, and few countries have open discussions under the auspices of professional organisations such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Eastern and southern Europe, Latin America, and Asia have no mechanisms for handling fraud properly.

If 23 years have not been sufficient for Britain to move on, will countries such as France have to wait until 2020 or 2050 to see improvement? A series of high profile cases that exposed fabrications of data in the late 1970s and early '80s in the United States resulted in the Health Research Institution Act 1985, . . . [Full text of this article]

hervemaison@wanadoo.fr, Public Health Department, Lariboisière Fernand Widal Hospital, 200 rue du Faubourg St Denis, 75010 Paris, France

Public Health Department, Lariboisière Fernand Widal Hospital, 200 rue du Faubourg St Denis, 75010 Paris, France

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