A study released earlier this month reveals that the number of articles retracted due to scientific misconduct has increased. The authors claim that because some retraction announcements published by journals etc. are “Incomplete, uninformative or misleading…”, earlier estimates of retractions due to misconduct have been too low.
The authors examined 2.047 retracted articles in the field of biomedical and life-science research. They found that 21.3% of the retracted articles were attributable to error, and 67.4% were attributable to some form of misconduct. Of the articles retracted due to misconduct, 43.4% were fraud or expected fraud. 14.2% of the retractions were attributable to duplicate publications, and plagiarism accounted for 9.8%.
The paper is published under open access and is gratis to download.
Ferric C. Fang, R. Grant Steen, and Arturo Casadevall. Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications. PNAS 2012 109 (42). 17028-17033; published ahead of print October 1, 2012, DOI:10.1073/pnas.1212247109