Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications
- 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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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.
Footnotes
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↵1F.C.F., R.G.S., and A.C. contributed equally to this work.
- ↵2To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: arturo.casadevall{at}einstein.yu.edu.
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Author contributions: F.C.F., R.G.S., and A.C. designed research, performed research, analyzed data, and wrote the paper.
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The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
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This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1212247109/-/DCSupplemental.
