Israeli surgeons are reprimanded for allowing their names to appear on a study they had not done

The Israel Medical Association says that in future it will take action against academic fraud by investigating complaints and discouraging the relatively widespread phenomenon of “gift authorship,” in which the names of doctors not involved in research are included in the list of authors.

Its announcement comes after a recent case where a surgeon, who was presenting details of a study to a conference, claimed that six doctors had been involved in the research when in fact he had been the sole researcher. Moreover, the surgeon claimed that it was a prospective study and that informed consent had been obtained from the participants, whereas actually it had been conducted retrospectively and without informed consent.

Oleg Avrutis, a surgeon at the Bikur Holim Hospital, Jerusalem, was …