title: Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications.
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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Laboratory Medicine, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
authors.forename: Ferric C
authors.initials: FC
authors.lastname: Fang
authors.forename: R Grant
authors.initials: RG
authors.lastname: Steen
authors.forename: Arturo
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Casadevall
mesh_terms: D015713:Duplicate Publications as Topic; D015714:Plagiarism; D039781:PubMed; D012180:Retraction of Publication as Topic; D015871:Scientific Misconduct / Q000706:statistics & numerical data* / Q000639:trends; D013997:Time Factors