Misconduct Accounts for the Majority of Retracted Scientific Publications

By Ferric C. Fang, R. Grant Steen, and Arturo Casadevall Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Oct. 1, 2012 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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