Published 17 September 2008, doi:10.1136/bmj.a1711
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a1711

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Lancet withdraws research paper and warns authors about rules of "gift authorship"

Clare Dyer

1 BMJ

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

The Lancet has retracted a paper by researchers at the Medical University of Innsbruck in Austria after an official investigation found that the clinical trial it reported had serious ethical and procedural flaws.

Austria’s Agency for Health and Food Safety says that the urologists who conducted the trial of stem cell treatment for stress incontinence in women failed to get proper ethical approval and neglected to adequately inform patients of the experimental nature of the procedures. In one case an insurance confirmation form seemed to have been forged.

"In our view, the conclusions of this official investigation pinpoint so many irregularities in the conduct of their work that, taken together, the paper should be retracted from the published record," the Lancet’s senior executive editor, Sabine Kleinert, and editor, Richard Horton, wrote in a comment in the journal this month (Lancet 2008;372:789-90). "In the report, the inspectors raise doubts . . . [Full text of this article]


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