Doctors plan to relaunch smartphone app after being cleared of plagiarism

Three doctors who developed a smartphone app on critical appraisal have been cleared of plagiarism by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service.

A regulatory panel rejected charges by the General Medical Council that Afroze Khan, Shahnawaz Khan, and Zishan Sheikh acted dishonestly in knowingly copying structure, contents, and material from a book, The Doctor’s Guide to Critical Appraisal, when developing their Critical APPraisal app, representing it as their own work, and seeking to make a gain from the material.

The panel accepted the opinion of the doctors’ expert witness, Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence based medicine at Oxford University, that the subject matter of critical appraisal was widely known and used in the medical profession and that differences …