Fraud and misconduct in medical research. 3rd edition. Stephen Lock, Frank Wells, Michael Farthing (eds). (280 pages, £40.) BMJ Publishing Group, 2001. ISBN 0-7279-1508-8.

Fraud and misconduct are, it seems, endemic in scientific research. Even Galileo, Newton and Mendel appear to have fudged some of their results. From palaeontology to nanotechnology, scientific fraud reappears with alarming regularity. The Office of Research Integrity in the USA investigated 127 serious allegations of scientific fraud last year. The reasons for conducting fraudulent research and misrepresenting research in scientific publications are complex. The pressures to publish and to achieve career progression and promotion and the lure of fame and money may all play a part, but deeper forces often seem to be at work.

How important are fraud and misconduct in primary care research? As far as Family Practice goes, mercifully rare, as I pointed out in a recent editorial. Sadly, however, there are examples, all along the continuum from the beginning of a clinical trial to submission of a final manuscript, of dishonesty and deceit in general practice and primary care research. Patients have been invented to increase numbers (and profits) in clinical trials, ethical guidance on consent and confidentiality have been breached, and ‘salami’ and duplicate publication crop up from time to time.

It is important for us all to be aware of the legal and ethical frameworks within which research is undertaken and of the steps that are available to prevent fraudulent and dishonest research being undertaken and written up. This excellent book, originally put together by Stephen Lock, an editor of the British Medical Journal, and now revised extensively by Michael Farthing, editor of the gastroenterology journal Gut, provides a superb overview of the entire topic.

Background material on the regulatory frameworks, in North America as well as Europe, is laid out in detail, and the history of fraud and misconduct is illustrated admirably by contributions from Stephen Lock and Frank Wells, a co-editor and expert in ethical and legal issues relating to the pharmaceutical industry. A series of slightly less riveting accounts of individual country’s approaches to research fraud follows, with the best chapters coming towards the end, where personal experiences are used to illuminate the devastating effects that involvement in research fraud can have for patients and practitioners. Michael Farthing has contributed an excellent editorial view on research misconduct to conclude the book.

In addition, Farthing is to be congratulated on setting up the UK’s Committee on Publication Ethics, an organization linked to the BMA, and co-chaired by Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal, to which editors can turn for advice about publication misconduct. Editors often face difficult, and sometimes lonely, decisions about the diagnosis of publication fraud, the most appropriate response to make to authors and their institutions and the sanctions that may or may not be brought to bear on authors who break the rules. Journal authors will find this book valuable, but its contents should be understood by anyone undertaking, supervising or publishing research in general practice and primary care; research integrity cannot be taken for granted and is certainly not an inherited characteristic.