One of my most vivid schoolday memories is of being told off for doing something I didn’t know was forbidden. My crime was “running in the school corridors” which seemed perfectly reasonable behaviour to me (as I was late for a lesson), but which apparently was against the school rules. I can still remember my [...]

I just registered for an ORCID ID—I’m 0000-0002-4202-7813 in case you were wondering, but I still answer to Liz. I know I’ve written about ORCID before, but that was before it was launched, and I think it’s such a neat idea I’ve decided to blog about it again now it is up and running and [...]

In a country where over half the population is called Kim, Park, or Lee, it probably shouldn’t have come as such a surprise to find myself talking about research misconduct with Dr Hwang in South Korea. Although he shares a name with a researcher notorious for fraud, this Dr Hwang is busy running courses on [...]

I’m generally a big fan of guidelines—in fact, I’ve written a few myself, but a recent conversation with a wise Indian researcher made me ponder their darker side. We were talking about research integrity and he explained how he endeavours to embed this into every stage of the research process at his institution, from the [...]

The BMJ recently had to apologise for having published a picture of a Japanese doctor called Dr Yoshitaka Fujii which turned out not to show the Dr Yoshitaka Fujii who has hit the headlines recently because of research fraud leading to the retraction of a record number of publications but his namesake. This embarrassing mistake [...]

A recent Cochrane systematic review caught my eye, not so much for its conclusions but for what it shows about the state of the medical literature. According to Paul Garner, one of the review’s authors, they found a study on nearly 28,000 children, which was published in the BMJ in 2006, which concluded that deworming [...]

I just attended the launch of the concordat to support research integrity developed by some major UK funders and Universities UK. It’s easy to quibble at documents that try to achieve consensus on big issues. Invariably there are some recommendations I’d prefer to be stronger, but instead of carping I’ll focus on some highly positive [...]

Yesterday I took part in a joint BMJ/COPE meeting on research misconduct. The discussion set me thinking about factors that create and sustain healthy research environments. When we talk about misconduct, we often think of the cases that hit the headlines (such as Hwang Woo-suk or Scott Reuben). If we use these examples to suggest [...]

Last week, I had dinner with a member of the House of Lords, but he was wearing shorts and walking boots, not ermine, and I was wearing a sundress and plenty of mosquito repellent. Why might this be of interest to BMJ readers? Well, the Lord in question (Lord Bates of Langbaurgh) is walking 4000 [...]