Science of Impossible ???

PNAS paper investigate hot topic

Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications

1. Ferric C. Fang^a,^b,¹, 
2. R. Grant Steen^c,¹, and 
3. Arturo Casadevall^d,¹,²

+Author Affiliations

1. Departments of ^aLaboratory Medicine and
2. ^bMicrobiology, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, WA 98195;
3. ^cMediCC! Medical Communications Consultants, Chapel Hill, NC 27517; and
4. ^dDepartment of Microbiology and Immunology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY 10461

1. Edited by Thomas Shenk, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved September 6, 2012 (received for review July 18, 2012)

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.