2007, Number 2
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Rev Biomed 2007; 18 (2)
Fraud in authorship of scientific papers
Hernández-Chavarría F
Language: Spanish
References: 37
Page: 127-140
PDF size: 310.97 Kb.
ABSTRACT
The scientific fraud, as any other deceptive conducts, implicates deliberate dishonesty outside the ethics norms. Corrupt scientifics invent data, experiments, results or fabricate misinterpretations to their information. But, the most common misconduct is the inappropriate assigned coauthorship, perpetrated in order to maximize the number of publications, due to personal ambition, vanity, desire of reconnaissance or pursuit economical compensation. However, independently of the desire of that misconduct, always the moral capacity to distinguish the true is lost. In this point, is important to remark that honesty is an absolute term, which do not admits intermediate degrees.
The rules to assign the authorship are well establish, as an active participation in generation of new scientific information, writing or intellectually reviewing the manuscript and approving the last version for publication. Thus, is important to point out some of the actions that not justified coauthorship, such as: Technical edition of a manuscript, including translation to other idiom, bibliographic research, patients enrolling, routine analysis or applications of statistical tests, acquisitions of funds or its administration, which are sometimes the only task of some directors of research projects; also, in some cases the authorship of a thesis tutor is questioned. The above arguments frequently are used for some fraudulent persons to legitimate their sign in a paper; and their analysis confirm, that not all the members of a research team could be coauthors of all the publications generated from that group.
The best way to avoid misconducts is to rule by the ethical principles learn since the school, and get conscience that any deceptive action is a fraud and corrodes any human activity, including science.
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