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Record W1965217323 · doi:10.1136/bmj.d8357

Research misconduct in the UK

2012· letter· en· W1965217323 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Fiona Godlee, Elizabeth Wager

Bibliographic record

VenueBMJ · 2012
Typeletter
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicAcademic integrity and plagiarism
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMisconductScientific misconductCriminologyPsychologyPolitical scienceLawMedicine

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Time to act Research misconduct can harm patients, distort the evidence base, misdirect research effort, waste funds, and damage public trust in science. Countries all over the developed world are now recognising the need to set up systems to deter, detect, and investigate research misconduct. Why does the United Kingdom have no plans to do the same? As Aniket Tavare outlines in the linked feature (doi:10.1136/bmj.d8212),1 high profile cases of misconduct have led the United States, Canada, Sweden, Norway, and Poland, among others, to create formal mechanisms for overseeing research integrity. In most countries responsibility lies with the institutions, but oversight varies greatly, and it is unclear which systems are most effective and efficient. None is perfect—the remit of the US Office of Research Integrity is limited to publicly funded health research; Australia’s recently established Research Integrity Committee is already being criticised for lacking teeth. But each system shows that the problem has been acknowledged, that institutions accept primary responsibility, and that governments and funders are seriously committed to tackling misconduct openly and with a range of statutory powers. In contrast, the UK has no official national body. The UK Research Integrity Office was established in 2006 and has done some useful things. But its function has always been advisory, and now that the major funders represented by Research Councils UK (RCUK) have decided not to continue the funding, it relies on voluntary funding from institutions. The Research Integrity Futures Working Group, set up by RCUK and Universities UK (UUK) and other bodies, has also apparently come to nothing. The working group’s report commissioned in 2009 called for an independent advisory body, …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Direct model labels (unvalidated)

Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.

Model armCategoriesStudy designConfidence
gemmaMetaresearchResearch integrity
Domain: Methods · Genre: Commentary
About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no
Not applicablehigh
gptResearch integrity
Domain: not available · Genre: Commentary
About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no
Not applicablehigh
models splitAgreement compares identical category sets and study designs across arms.

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.055
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.331
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Research integrity
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Commentary · Consensus signal: Commentary
Teacher disagreement score0.976
Threshold uncertainty score0.290

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0550.331
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.001
Bibliometrics0.0060.006
Science and technology studies0.0090.015
Scholarly communication0.0200.013
Open science0.0040.017
Research integrity0.0240.016
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0490.014

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.220
GPT teacher head0.461
Teacher spread0.242 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Labeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.

MetaresearchResearch integrity

The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.

Study designNot applicable
DomainMethods
GenreCommentary

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations20
Published2012
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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