Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications

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

doi:10.1073/pnas.1212247109

Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications

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

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

544 Scopus citations

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.

Original language	English (US)
Pages (from-to)	17028-17033
Number of pages	6
Journal	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Volume	109
Issue number	42
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1212247109
State	Published - Oct 16 2012
Externally published	Yes

Keywords

Bibliometric analysis
Biomedical publishing
Ethics
Research misconduct

ASJC Scopus subject areas

General

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10.1073/pnas.1212247109

Cite this

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Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications

Abstract

Keywords

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