Tightening of Peer Review Standards

One of the aspects of scientific conduct that everyresearcher takes for granted is the assurance thatthe peer review system stops fraud and misappropriationof data, and maintains a certain level oforiginality and competition in the research field.When, in July 2008, I received an e-mail from aconcerned party about a reference to an abstractfrom Nkengafac, et al. in a review published in TheNew England Journal of Medicine (Taylor, et al. NEngl J Med. 2008;358:1590-602), I wondered what allthis had to do with me. It turns out that the abstractby Nkengafac (accepted in the XVI International HIVDrug Resistance Workshop, Barbados, June 2007)was a copy, word by word, of the abstract in a journalpublished by my group (Palma, et al. Infect GenetEvol. 2007). The only difference was the country oforigin of the data; the word ‘Portugal’ was replacedby ‘Cameroon’. Suffice to say that the transpositionof the results was not so easily achieved, which calledthe attention of a reader, who then was kind enoughto contact me and the author of the review.