New Detection Method Could Have Caught Lance Armstrong

There are several articles on Fraudbytes discussing doping in professional sports, but is there a way to stop doping? A recent article on road.cc discusses research that claims it could have caught Lance Armstrong. The current methods for detecting drugs in an athlete’s system are extremely sophisticated (i.e., if there was a drop of drugs in an Olympic sized pool, they would detect that drop). However, they are only able to detect the drug if it was used in the last 48 hours. According to Yannis Pitsiladis, a professor of sport and exercise science with a particular interest in genetics, his new method can detect if the athlete has doped in the past several months and, potentially, even years.

Detecting Fraud in Academic Research

The scientific community is often considered to be less filled with fraud than other disciplines. Typically when we think of fraud, we think of it occurring in businesses and think of someone walking away with a lot of money. However, fraud can also easily happen in academic research (see these previous posts for examples) where someone walks away with a lot of published papers. Discover Magazine recently posted an article titled The Perfect Scientific Crime. The article outlines several ways that someone could commit fraud without being detected by creating and using fictitious data. The purpose of the article, however, is not to help fraudsters, but rather to point out a few things that others should be aware of to help deter fraud in the academic community.

Even Cancer Research Lacks Integrity

An article in Discover Magazine details some of the practices that occurred for 50 years in cancer research that both slowed and misled cancer research for decades. In cancer research, scientists use cancer cell lines (cells that contain a particular type of cancer) taken from tumors infected with the cancer in order to test possible treatments. The problem is that it is very easy for these cell lines to become contaminated, thereby changing the characteristics of the cell line. For years scientists used contaminated cell lines for their research, with numerous publications occurring based on false lines. 

Should Legal Penalties for Research Misconduct be Similar to Those for Fraud?

Research misconduct (when research is falsified or plagiarized) has historically been dealt with internally, but Richard Smith thinks that should change. In The New Scientist, Smith argues that “Research misconduct degrades trust in science and causes real-world harm. As such, it should be a crime akin to fraud.” False research essentially causes people to believe in something that is incorrect, which can affect their actions—not unlike the way that financial statement fraud can change people’s investment decisions. Smith gives several reasons why research misconduct should be illegal and discusses how it should be treated in our society.

Scientific Research Fraud is on the Rise--Especially in China

In accounting research, we had the first retraction in decades in the past year. Soon after the retraction, evidence was provided suggesting that the retracted article reported some very suspicious claims that were essentially impossible. The author(s) never provided a rebuttal to the claims and the author who claimed to obtain the amazing data for the article suddenly retired and is reportedly very hard (or impossible) to contact. While the retraction never stated that the article was a fraud, it all seems very suspicious...

In the harder sciences, The Economist reported this week that there has recently been a sudden uptick in fraudulent scientific research, especially in China. Here is a taste of the article:

Scientific Fraud: Autism and Child Vaccines

CNN is reporting that researchers are labeling academic research that linked autism to childhood vaccines as "fraudulent." Here is a quote:

Who Blows the Whistle on Corporate Fraud?

A forthcoming study in the Journal of Finance focuses on improving our understanding of fraud detection methods.  The authors discuss their paper at the Harvard Law School Corporate Governance Blog.  Here is a sampler of their discussion:

The main result emerging from our analysis is that in the United States fraud detection relies on a wide range of, often improbable, actors. No single one of them accounts for more than 20 percent of the cases detected. These findings suggest that to improve corporate governance abroad one needs to adopt a broader view than implied by the legal or private litigation approaches to corporate governance.

... 

The second main result is that the incentives for the existing network of whistleblowers are weak. Auditors, analysts, and employees do not seem to gain much and, in the cases of employees, seem to lose outright from whistleblowing. The two notable exceptions regarding who benefits from whistleblowing are journalists involved in large cases and employees who have access to a qui tam suit.

A natural implication of our findings is that the role of monetary incentives should be expanded. We find that the use of monetary rewards provides positive incentives for whistleblowing. As the evidence in the healthcare industry shows, such a system appears to be able to be fashioned in a way that does not lead to an excessive amount of frivolous suits.