Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications

2012/10/01 by Ferric C. Fang, R. Grant Steen, Arturo Casadevall · 1 voice · 29 citations
Medicine · Social Sciences · #Academic integrity and plagiarism #Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education

paper · pdf · doi:10.1073/pnas.1212247109

openalex publication_date 2012/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31

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.

Citations

• Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
• Retracted Science and the Retraction Index

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Discussions

• 🧵4/5 📉 La mala conducta científica (fabricació, manipulació, plagi...) és la causa principal de les publicacions retractades. 👉 Així ho demostra aquest estudi clàssic de Fang, Steen i Casadevall a [bsky, 0 points, 1 comments]