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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Oct 16, 2012;109 (42): 17028-33.

Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications.

Ferric C Fang, R Grant Steen, Arturo Casadevall
Author Information
  1. Ferric C Fang: Department of Laboratory Medicine, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
PMID: 23027971 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1212247109

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.

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MeSH Term

Duplicate Publications as Topic
Plagiarism
PubMed
Retraction of Publication as Topic
Scientific Misconduct
Time Factors
Journal Article
Article has an altmetric score of 1316

Word Cloud

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