ON THE GRAPEVINE
Medical knowledge under threat
Fraudulent papers are making it difficult to summarise the current state of knowledge on the treatment of diseases.
Photo: Radboud University Medical Center
According to a report in the journal Science, the Dutch neuroscientist Rene Aquarius and his colleague Kim Wever wanted to summarise the current knowledge on the treatment of apoplectic strokes but found 10 times as many articles as they had expected. What’s more, they found that many of them contained manipulated illustrations. Other researchers also discovered countless papers that had been copied and altered. Aquarius and his colleagues fear that this is not only going to falsify the conclusions that might be drawn from the systematic reviews that are so important for medicine, but also that these reviews could take several months longer to produce.
