EDITORIAL Ten Simple Rules for Protecting Research Integrity

Research integrity is frequently highlighted as an essential component of modern medicine and science. Adherence to the ethical principles of one’s profession might seem like a simple task, but research misconduct remains a serious problem. Despite repeated calls for increased emphasis on the importance of research integrity [1–6] and a proliferation of guidelines regu-lating scientific misconduct at the international, national, and institutional levels [7,8], recent scandals concerning falsification and suppression of results [9,10] suggest that we need to more carefully nurture the ethical integrity of our research endeavours. Most of the recent controversy concerning scientific misconduct has focused on plagiarism and fabrication of results. This type of malpractice has rightly been universally recognized as a very serious breach of research integrity. However, the focus on these abuses has distracted attention away from other practices which, while they may not jeopardize the scientific process to the same extent, are nonetheless clearly breaches of scientific integrity. Much more could be done to combat authorship misattribution, failure to declare relevant conflicts of interest (COIs), failure to report results, and misuse of metrics in funding decisions—in terms of both establishing stronger guidelines and ensuring their enforcement