Research and publication integrity

This branch covers honesty, completeness, credit and accountability in the research record, divided by the integrity issue: reporting distortion, reproducibility, fabrication, retraction, ethical guidance, authorship, writing support, funding disclosure, plagiarism and research waste. It leaves trial registration and results posting to transparency and disclosure, payment reporting to promotion rules, journal procedures to getting published, copyright and reuse permissions to rights and permissions, and company publication workflows to Good Publication Practice.

• Publication-ethics guidance and professional codes — guidance bodies, case advice, shared duties and harm from publishing findings
• Spin and distortion in reporting — forms, frequency, incentives, pressure on writers and prevention
• Reproducibility and the research-integrity environment — reproduction failures, research practices, national measures and group culture
• Fabrication, fraud and their detection — misconduct, peer-review limits, image scrutiny, AI, allegations and consequences
• What retraction does and fails to do to the record — counts, incomplete correction, continuing harm and unretracted papers
• Authorship — qualification, managing the author list, byline order, patient and caregiver participation, and enforcement
• Medical writers and ghostwriting — boundaries, association guidance, writer credit, evidence of practice and professional responses
• Industry funding and disclosure — interests, financial support, attribution and influence on the published record
• Plagiarism and text recycling — credit, prevention, reuse, acceptability, similarity detection and commissioned work
• Preventing research waste — non-publication, reporting accountability, prior evidence and writers’ actions across the research lifecycle