Click on the title above for a link to a new website where:
A team of French life sciences grad students has launched an online repository of fraudulent scientific papers, and is calling on researchers to report studies tainted by misconduct. The website -- called Scientific Red Cards -- is still in a beta version, but once it's fully operational it should help the scientific community police the literature even when problems slip past journal editors, the students claim. The website color-codes misconduct into three categories: red for data-related misconduct, including fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism; blue for publication-related misconduct, such as when editorial policies are not followed; and green for research practice misconduct, including problems with consent forms. Each problematic paper in the register includes a full bibliographic reference, a link to published accounts of the misconduct, and a discussion board for users to leave their comments. So far, only around 30 papers have been listed.
(Email communication from Adrian Smith, University of Leeds)
