Ethical publishing in intensive care medicine: A narrative review

Abstract

Ethical standards in the context of scientific publications are increasingly gaining attention. A narrative review of the literature concerning publication ethics was conducted as found in PubMed, Google Scholar, relevant news articles, position papers, websites and other sources. The Committee on Publication Ethics has produced guidelines and schedules for the handling of problem situations that have been adopted by professional journals and publishers worldwide as guidelines to authors. The defined requirements go beyond the disclosure of conflicts of interest or the prior registration of clinical trials. Recommendations to authors, editors and publishers of journals and research institutions were formulated with regard to issues of authorship, double publications, plagiarism, and conflicts of interest, with special attention being paid to unethical research behavior and data falsification. This narrative review focusses on ethical publishing in intensive care medicine. As scientific misconduct with data falsification damage patients and society, especially if fraudulent studies are considered important or favor certain therapies and downplay their side effects, it is important to ensure that only studies are published that have been carried out with highest integrity according to predefined criteria. For that also the peer review process has to be conducted in accordance with the highest possible scientific standards and making use of available modern information technology. The review provides the current state of recommendations that are considered to be most relevant particularly in the field of intensive care medicine.

Keywords: Boldt fraud; Duplicate publication; Fujii fraud; Peer review; Plagiarism; Publication retractions; Scientific misconduct.

Figure 1

Retracted publications in biomedical literature and those arising from 28 critical care journals in the last five decades. Results of a PubMed search (available from: URL: http//www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed) on 05/04/2015 with the search term (A) ‘’retraction of publication (publication type)’’ for the biomedical literature and (B) that of Table 1 for the critical care medicine literature (search terms described in Table 1).