Publication misconduct includes a range of unethical behaviours, such as plagiarism, breach of confidence and in appropriate authorship. The most egregious cases are easy to recognize and widely condemned, but the gradient between normal and unethical behaviour is often a gradual one. Clinicians and researchers should be aware of the full spectrum of publication misconduct and understand that s...

BACKGROUND There is a perception that socioeconomically disadvantaged patients tend to sue their doctors more frequently. As a result, some physicians may be reluctant to treat poor patients or treat such patients differently from other patient groups in terms of medical care provided. QUESTIONS/PURPOSES We (1) examined existing literature to refute the notion that poor patients are inclined ...

State apology laws offer a separate avenue from traditional damages-centric tort reforms to address medical malpractice liability. These laws facilitate apologies from physicians by excluding statements of apology from malpractice trials. Prior research suggests that apologies may assuage the anger of patients, decrease the number of claims filed, and lower settlement amounts. Using a unique da...

research misconduct is not a new problem in the research field. however, in recent years, the researchers themselves could be a victim of a newly expanded trouble: being hijacked by email. being obsessive about publishing one’s research results and finding the “real journals” seems not to be enough in recent years. in this article we will have a closer look to this issue and discuss two real ex...

Although numerous studies have attempted to understand the causes of various forms of police misconduct, there is still no clear theoretical explanation of police misbehavior. Akers’ social learning theory posits that peer associations, attitudes, reinforcement, and modeling are predictors of delinquency and crime in general. With this article, we seek to determine if the theory can account for...

Journalists who cover scientific research, including chemistry research, have an obligation to report on alleged cases of research misconduct when knowledge of these surface. New Government definitions of research misconduct, beginning in the late 1990s with the Clinton Administration, have helped scientists, policymakers, as well as journalists sort out and make sense of alleged research misco...

This article draws on research traditions and insights from Criminology to elaborate on the problems associated with current practices of measuring scientific misconduct. Analyses of the number of retracted articles are shown to suffer from the fact that the distinct processes of misconduct, detection, punishment, and publication of a retraction notice, all contribute to the number of retractio...

Retractions of scientific papers have recently been in the spotlight. Unfortunately, the interpretation of statistics about them is often flawed. The realisation that most retractions follow from scientific misconduct [1] seems to have reinforced, in the minds of both scientists and journalists, the idea that data on retractions, and generally data on findings of misconduct, provide information...