Fraud, plagiarism, and other misconduct explain most biomedical publication retractions

Los Angeles Times : This brief piece reports on a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper whose abstract begins, “A detailed review of all 2047 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%).” The news piece notes that this “contradicts earlier studies that suggest most retractions are the result of errors.” It quotes one of the study investigators: “Authors commonly write, âWe regret we have to retract our paper because the work is not reproducible,’ which is not exactly a lie. The work indeed was not reproducible—because it was fraudulent.” Retractions for fraud or suspected fraud have reportedly increased by an order of magnitude since 1975. The study “found that 43% of all retractions came from just 38 labs—out of thousands worldwide.”