Research? Increasingly polluted by fraud and plagiarism. According to one of America's leading medical ethicists, Arthur Caplan of the Nyu Langone Medical Center, in fact, the scientific community is facing a serious problem of 'intellectual smog' within academic publications, which represents a serious threat to "the reliability, utility and value of science and of medicine,” he writes in an editorial in the journal 'Mayo Clinic Proceedings.'
In a editorial, Caplan points out that “the pollution of science and medicine by plagiarism, fraud and wild publications is corroding the reliability of research. And yet, no one is sounding serious alarms on this issue”.
Some examples include the proliferation of journals in which authors pay to have their articles published, which "makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish valuable studies from trash," writes Caplan. Equally worrying is the falsification of data or their deliberate deletion.
