Lancet withdraws research paper and warns authors about rules of "gift authorship"

The Lancet has retracted a paper by researchers at the Medical University of Innsbruck in Austria after an official investigation found that the clinical trial it reported had serious ethical and procedural flaws. Austria’s Agency for Health and Food Safety says that the urologists who conducted the trial of stem cell treatment for stress incontinence in women failed to get proper ethical approval and neglected to adequately inform patients of the experimental nature of the procedures. In one case an insurance confirmation form seemed to have been forged. “In our view, the conclusions of this official investigation pinpoint so many irregularities in the conduct of their work that, taken together, …