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Saturday, March 10, 2012

Penn Clears Two Faculty Psychiatrists of Research Misconduct Charges







Last July, Penn psychiatrist Jay Amsterdam alleged in a letter to the federal Office of Research Integrity that five researchers, including Penn's Laszlo Gyulai and Dwight Evans, chair of the Penn psychiatry department, had "engaged in scientific misconduct by allowing their names to be appended to a manuscript that was drafted by" Scientific Therapeutics Information (STI), a medical communications company, that had been "hired by" GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). The paper, which appeared in June 2001 in the American Journal of Psychiatry, reported on a small clinical trial of the antidepressant Paxil, partly funded by GSK and the National Institutes of Health. Amsterdam also claimed the paper was "biased" in favor of Paxil's safety and efficacy.

Amsterdam's letter argued that ORI should be involved because NIH Director Francis Collins has written that ghostwriting "may be appropriate for consideration as a case of plagiarism," which falls under the federal definition of research misconduct.

But Penn has concluded that no plagiarism occurred. In a statement yesterday, the university says that a faculty committee found "there was no plagiarism and no merit to the allegations of research misconduct" because Evans and Gyulai helped conduct the research and analyze the results and "contributed to the paper." The paper "presented the research findings accurately," Penn says.

The entire article is here.