Thursday, January 19, 2006

Another Peer Review Failure

Now comes The Lancet, a British medical journal, telling us that a report of a cancer study it published last year was false. While the principal author was Norwegian, the five co-authors were American, four from M.D. Anderson in Houston.

The peer review process did not discover that the data was made up. But, worse in my opinion, is the reaction of Anderson. The VP for Research at Anderson laments, "There is no worse feeling in the world" than for a researcher to learn that he has put his name to a paper with fabricated data. My question is did the co-authors not review the study and evaluate the results before signing their name to it. Is the rush to publication such that the researchers don't care what's under their name until the report is found to be a lie?

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