An AAMC ad hoc committee on research fraud identified three steps institutions might take to combat fraud in medical research: determination of the magnitude of the problem by a formal study; institution of guidelines for research, publication, and promotion; and establishment of policies for investigating allegations of fraud. (Author/MLW)

According to the medical research community that attempts to define the scope of fraud, biomedical fraud includes such phenomena as salami science, which is the practice of dividing a project into a number of brief publications, called least publishable units; autoplagiarism, the practice of writing up the same study in a variety of forms and…