Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences· 2012Q1
Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications
- 1,239citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2012year
Short summary
Misconduct, not error, is the primary driver of retracted scientific publications, accounting for 67.4% of retractions in a 2012 review of PubMed-indexed articles.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- 67.4% of retractions were due to misconduct (fraud, duplicate publication, plagiarism).
- Only 21.3% of retractions were attributed to error.
- Fraud-related retractions have increased approximately 10-fold since 1975.
- Retraction announcements are often incomplete, leading to an underestimation of fraud's role.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
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.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012 · DOI ↗
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