Clinical trials are the easiest area for the UK government to establish research-integrity standards because they are already regulated and must be listed in the Health Research Authority registry, according to researchers.
During a House of Commons Science and Technology Committee inquiry on research integrity on 4 December, MPs were told that clinical trials provided a good basis for safeguarding research integrity as they already had clear rules to measure and ensure compliance. Additionally, the HRA is in a good position to make sure study findings are published, MPs were told.
“Lots of things in ‘research integrity’ are hard to capture in hard logical rules, so you end up with waffly ‘concordats’ and rules that are applied inconsistently,” said Ben Goldacre (above), a physician who runs the Evidence-based Medicine Datalab at the University of Oxford.
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