Invited speaker: Otto Kalliokoski, Ph.D. (Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen, Department of Veterinary and Animal Sciences)
Have you ever wondered whether a peer-reviewed animal study you’ve read was actually conducted?
This possibility is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. There is a growing awareness of fabricated studies being passed off as real ones in scientific journals. The practice is not new, but with the ever-increasing pressures to publish, combined with a greater availability of computer software capable of aiding fraudsters (most recently, the explosive adoption of generative artificial intelligence – GenAI), the numbers of faked publications are reaching new highs. How will this affect our ability to make sense of scientific literature in our field going forward?
In the course of carrying out systematic reviews of rat studies in depression and pain, we uncovered a great number of problematic studies. Having sifted through hundreds of papers across two unrelated fields of laboratory animal studies, we have found that 10-20 % of studies are unreliable; possibly even fabricated. These are shocking numbers to us – numbers that cannot be ignored.
In this talk, Associate Professor Dr. Otto Kalliokoski from the University of Copenhagen will present the findings of his investigations. While he cannot offer simple solutions to the problem, his aim is to raise awareness of these issues, and show how they often remain hidden in plain sight.
