The World Conference on Research Integrity is being held in Athens and there are 800 participants (100 of whom are remote). It’s a record and the program is dense. Yesterday (June 2, 2024), there were pre-workshops in small groups. Then the opening session with a good lecture by JH Solbakk (Professor of medical ethics, Oslo) on the links between excellence and integrity. Great conference with many references to Oedipus, Plato, Aristotle and other local celebrities. He detailed the 8 roles of the researcher. Excellence requires publishing a lot to be recognized… which does not always go with integrity.
A busy schedule with discussions on AI
The program is on the site and you can download the program book (68 pages) with lots of information. the book of abstracts (400 pages). Many plenary sessions, etc. Note that unlike the previous congress MDPI is no longer a sponsor. This is the will of the committee. The program is not very readable on the site and a colleague made one readable and accessible on Twitter!!! There is a Twitter account #WCRI2024 allowing you to view slides and comments.
A large presence of scientific journal editors… journal integrity referents and integrity organizations.
Assessing publication research integrity – understanding the key techniques
With other French colleagues, we participated in an excellent workshop (around 50 people) from which I copied the program. We know the speakers and they brought many tools to detect fraud in articles. The examples were biological (gels, DNA sequences, other images except radiology) and clinical with randomized controlled trials. J Byrne, a French-speaking Australian, provided guides for analyzing articles with two entries: verifiable and plausible. Not everything is verifiable. I have his latest article on my desk and will analyze it within the month.
Avenell had us analyze an old randomized controlled trial (RCT) by Y Sato in JAMA using the REAPPRAISED list. Excellent exercise when we know that 25% of RCTs are false. I presented this REAPPRAISED list in 2020 and it was freely accessible at that time… If you need it, I’ll give you the PDF. She briefly introduced us to TRACT (Trustworthiness in RAndomized Controlled Trials), RIA for RCTs, and CPC-TST (Cochrane Pregnancy and Childbirth Trustworthiness Screening Tool). A Avenell, with colleagues, published Y Sato’s practices in detail (122 retractions according to Retraction Watch).
Jana Chritopher presented her experience to FEBS Press…they identify a lot of image fraud…with a thought: we would do better to publish fraudulent articles and then withdraw them… this would prevent us from seeing them appear in other journals after our refusal !!!
E Bik showed us six tools for finding AI-altered images: impressive, but still not very reliable. These tools require expertise to use them.
