Abstract of the article: A detailed review of all 2,047 biomedical and life-science research articles indexed by PubMed as retracted on May 3, 2012 revealed th

Abstract of the article: 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. In general (Table 1) Retractions are not strongly related to Journal prestige, which was interesting to me. The Nature Neuroscience, Neuron and Journal of Neuroscience do not feature in the list, which, in my eyes, raises their prestige, or point to fraud in Neuroscience being harder to detect. A side note: In the paper the authors use 3D pie charts with a bad color scheme (Fig 2. breakup by country). No percentages are given. Please don't do this folks, we're professionals here, not the sales dept. One clarification to the blog post: it mentions duplication, which in science I consider a very good thing. I wish there were more papers that said 'we replicated your finding, thereby increasing it's credibility'. The paper authors refer to duplicate publication, which means taking the same paper and submitting it repeatedly to several journals to increase publications. A dishonest thing not from a scientific data point of view, but a scientific credit point of view.