Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications |
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| Authors: | Ferric C. Fang R. Grant Steen Arturo Casadevall |
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| Affiliation: | Departments of aLaboratory Medicine and;bMicrobiology, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, WA, 98195;;cMediCC! Medical Communications Consultants, Chapel Hill, NC, 27517; and;dDepartment of Microbiology and Immunology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY, 10461 |
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| Abstract: | A detailed review of all 2,047 biomedical and life-science research articles indexed by PubMed as retracted on May 3, 2012 revealed that only 21.3% of retractions were attributable to error. In contrast, 67.4% of retractions were attributable to misconduct, including fraud or suspected fraud (43.4%), duplicate publication (14.2%), and plagiarism (9.8%). Incomplete, uninformative or misleading retraction announcements have led to a previous underestimation of the role of fraud in the ongoing retraction epidemic. The percentage of scientific articles retracted because of fraud has increased ∼10-fold since 1975. Retractions exhibit distinctive temporal and geographic patterns that may reveal underlying causes. |
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| Keywords: | bibliometric analysis biomedical publishing ethics research misconduct |
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