Science Cheats

Fanga FC et al. Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications

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.

As universities chase an ever decreasing pot of cash and demand that their staff get their papers in the top journals or risk the sack such that they can get more money from government or you are in a sink or swim situation to get the results from your demanding boss who craves fame, the pressures are there to give the Bosses what they want and as a result scientific fraud can and does occur.
Sometimes two people are put on the same project and only one will be in a job at the end of the year.

This paper looks at the number of papers that are retracted which means the contents of the papers are not considered correct. Sometimes there are clerical errors but the vast majority is due to bad science or as can be seen fraud. Because of pressures this I fear is only going to intensify and there will be a disproportionate number of this is so called quality journals.


                               The Role call of dishonour

The United States,Germany, Japan, and China accounted for three-quarters of retractions because of fraud or suspected fraud. China and India collectively accounted for more cases of plagiarism (this is copying others work or ideas) than the United States, and duplicate publication (publishing the work in the two places) exhibited a pattern similar to that of plagiarism. The relationship between journal impact factor (the more people that cite work in journals the higher is their impact factor) and retraction rate was also found to vary with the cause of retraction. Journal-impact factor showed a highly significant correlation (there is more fraud in so-called good journals) with retractions because of fraud or error but not with those because of plagiarism or duplicate publication.


The USA has the most output and it is not surprising that they have the most cases of Fraud.The USA also has an Office of Integrity that is designed to root out this bad practise. Remember it is just a small fraction of cheats compared to the thousands of great papers.

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