Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications

Fang, Ferric C.; Steen, R. Grant; Casadevall, Arturo

Affiliations

¹Department of Laboratory Medicine, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, WA 98195

²Department of Microbiology, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, WA 98195

³MediCC! Medical Communications Consultants, Chapel Hill, NC 27517

⁴Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY 10461

Abstract and keywords

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 retractionswere 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.

Keywords: bibliometric analysis; biomedical publishing; ethics; research misconduct

Links

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1212247109

PubMed: 23027971

PubMedCentral: PMC3479492

WoS: 000310515800059

History

Received: 2012-07-18

Accepted: 2012-09-06

Online: 2012-10-01

Cited Works (3)

Year	Entry
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2011	Wager E, Williams P. Why and how do journals retract articles? an analysis of Medline retractions 1988–2008. J Med Ethics. September 2011;37(9):567-570.