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. 2012 Oct 16;109(42):17028-33.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1212247109. Epub 2012 Oct 1.

Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications

Ferric C Fang  1 , R Grant Steen, Arturo Casadevall
Affiliations

Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications

Ferric C Fang et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .

Erratum in

  • Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2013 Jan 15;110(3):1137

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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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
(A) Number of retracted articles for specific causes by year of retraction. (B) Percentage of published articles retracted for fraud or suspected fraud by year of publication.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Country of origin of publications retracted for fraud or suspected fraud (A), plagiarism (B), or duplicate publication (C).
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.
Relation of journal-impact factor to retractions for fraud or suspected fraud, error, and plagiarism, or duplicate publication. Journal-impact factor showed a highly significant correlation with the number of retractions for fraud or suspected fraud (A) (n = 889 articles in 324 journals, R2 = 0.08664, P < 0.0001) and error (B) (n = 437 articles in 218 journals, R2 = 0.1142, P < 0.0001), and a slight correlation with the number of retractions for plagiarism or duplicate publication (C) (n = 490 articles in 357 journals, R2 = 0.01420, P = 0.0243). The mean journal-impact factor of articles retracted because of fraud/suspected fraud or error was significantly different from that of papers retracted because of plagiarism or duplicate publication (D) (error bars ± SEM, P < 0.0001).
Fig. 4.
Fig. 4.
(A) Time-to-retraction as a function of year of retraction. R2 = 0.1236, P = 0.0414. (B) Time-to-retraction as a function of impact factor. Journal-impact factor correlated inversely with time-to-retraction for articles retracted because of fraud (n = 697, R2 = 0.01441, P = 0.0015) but not other causes.
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