Each year, the FDA inspects several hundred clinical trial sites and, sometimes, finds a serious problem, such as research misconduct. But a new analysis finds that the agency does not have a “systematic method” for communicating these findings to the medical and scientific communities.

Such problems can include falsifying data, failing to report adverse events and violating protocols, among other things, but often do not appear in the published studies that relied on the underlying trials, according to the analysis in JAMA...