Misconduct in science: does family medicine have a problem?

Through several recent and widely publicized cases, misconduct in science has caught the public's attention and reached the agenda of Congress. After a brief historical overview, this article presents a number of cases from family medicine raising issues of duplicate publication, plagiarism, inappropriate authorship, citation errors, inappropriate attribution, and data manipulation and fabrication. Misconduct policies from national organizations are noted, and specific recommendations are made that would limit growth of misconduct in the family medicine research community.