Scientific misconduct contributes to more retractions than previously realized, according to a new analysis published today (October 1) in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using retractions indexed in Pubmed, researchers found that fabrication, falsification, and duplication led to more retractions than error or plagiarism.
“Tracking down these corrections and retractions to find out what is going on is really innovative,” said David Resnik, a bioethicist at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, who did not participate in the research. It turns out that “a high percentage of time, there really some kind of misconduct” behind retractions.
Previous studies suggested that error, not ethical lapses, prompted most retractions. In order to get a clearer sense of what mistakes led to scientific studies being pulled from the literature, lead author Arturo Casadevall at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and his colleagues identified more than 2,000 articles listed in Pubmed ...
