Browse
Submit Data
Databases
API
Help

Dataset Information

0 Views

0 Connections

0 Citations

0 Reanalyses

0 Downloads

Omics score: 0

Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications.

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.

SUBMITTER: Fang FC

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3479492 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Json Xml

Publications

Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications.

Fang Ferric C FC Steen R Grant RG Casadevall Arturo A

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20121001 42

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 retr ...[more]

PMID: 23027971

Similar Datasets

Financial costs and personal consequences of research misconduct resulting in retracted publications.

Project description:The number of retracted scientific articles has been increasing. Most retractions are associated with research misconduct, entailing financial costs to funding sources and damage to the careers of those committing misconduct. We sought to calculate the magnitude of these effects. Data relating to retracted manuscripts and authors found by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) to have committed misconduct were reviewed from public databases. Attributable costs of retracted manuscripts, and publication output and funding of researchers found to have committed misconduct were determined. We found that papers retracted due to misconduct accounted for approximately $58 million in direct funding by the NIH between 1992 and 2012, less than 1% of the NIH budget over this period. Each of these articles accounted for a mean of $392,582 in direct costs (SD $423,256). Researchers experienced a median 91.8% decrease in publication output and large declines in funding after censure by the ORI.

| S-EPMC4132287 | biostudies-literature

Findings of scientific misconduct.

Project description: Not available

| S-EPMC4259661 | biostudies-literature

Findings of scientific misconduct.

Project description: Not available

| S-EPMC4259693 | biostudies-literature

Analysis of Retracted Manuscripts in Chemistry: Errors vs Misconduct.

Project description:In this Viewpoint we discuss Chemistry manuscripts retracted during the 2001-2021 period (a total of 1292 journal articles retrieved from the Retraction Watch database). We showed that 58.5% of Chemistry manuscripts were retracted due to misconduct; of them, 40.5% of retractions were due to self-plagiarism and 36% due to fraud. Errors and concerns unrelated to misconduct constituted 26% of all retractions. Retracted manuscripts had a median retraction time of 1.7 years and peer-review time of 71 days (but only 43 days for fraudulent manuscripts).

| S-EPMC10483516 | biostudies-literature

Scientific misconduct and accountability in teams.

Project description:Increasing complexity and multidisciplinarity make collaboration essential for modern science. This, however, raises the question of how to assign accountability for scientific misconduct among larger teams of authors. Biomedical societies and science associations have put forward various sets of guidelines. Some state that all authors are jointly accountable for the integrity of the work. Others stipulate that authors are only accountable for their own contribution. Alternatively, there are guarantor type models that assign accountability to a single author. We contribute to this debate by analyzing the outcomes of 80 scientific misconduct investigations of biomedical scholars conducted by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI). We show that the position of authors on the byline of 184 publications involved in misconduct cases correlates with responsibility for the misconduct. Based on a series of binary regression models, we show that first authors are 38% more likely to be responsible for scientific misconduct than authors listed in the middle of the byline (p<0.01). Corresponding authors are 14% more likely (p<0.05). These findings suggest that a guarantor-like model where first authors are ex-ante accountable for misconduct is highly likely to not miss catching the author responsible, while not afflicting too many bystanders.

| S-EPMC6497379 | biostudies-literature

Investigating and preventing scientific misconduct using Benford's Law.

Project description:Integrity and trust in that integrity are fundamental to academic research. However, procedures for monitoring the trustworthiness of research, and for investigating cases where concern about possible data fraud have been raised are not well established. Here we suggest a practical approach for the investigation of work suspected of fraudulent data manipulation using Benford's Law. This should be of value to both individual peer-reviewers and academic institutions and journals. In this, we draw inspiration from well-established practices of financial auditing. We provide synthesis of the literature on tests of adherence to Benford's Law, culminating in advice of a single initial test for digits in each position of numerical strings within a dataset. We also recommend further tests which may prove useful in the event that specific hypotheses regarding the nature of data manipulation can be justified. Importantly, our advice differs from the most common current implementations of tests of Benford's Law. Furthermore, we apply the approach to previously-published data, highlighting the efficacy of these tests in detecting known irregularities. Finally, we discuss the results of these tests, with reference to their strengths and limitations.

| S-EPMC10088595 | biostudies-literature

How many scientific papers should be retracted?

Project description: Not available

| S-EPMC1866214 | biostudies-literature

Street research market: dealing with scientific misconduct in Iran.

Project description:BACKGROUND:Scientific misconduct is a prevalent phenomenon with many undesirable consequences. In Iran, no original research have been done about scientific fraud. So, this study aimed at describing a challenging research misconduct in Iran, its related causes, and the ways Iranian authorities deal with it. METHODS:In this cross-sectional study, through a two-year period, all the advertisements installed in the study sites were collected and the content analysis was performed. Semi-structured interviews were held with experts for discovering the causes of misconduct. Also, published issues were collected for review of the laws on confronting the fraud in Iran. RESULTS:The content analysis resulted in identifying four categories of misconduct issues: advertising approach, types of services, outcome guarantee, and justifying the academic credit. Besides, reviewing the related literature indicated that Iranian government and the responsible authorities have recently established serious penalties for dealing with scientific misconduct through legislation. CONCLUSIONS:This study revealed some misconduct in scientific activities which has persuaded the authorities to enforce strict rules to deal with it. The effectiveness of this legislation needs to be investigated in some further studies.

| S-EPMC7446204 | biostudies-literature

Mixed-membership models of scientific publications.

Project description:PNAS is one of world's most cited multidisciplinary scientific journals. The PNAS official classification structure of subjects is reflected in topic labels submitted by the authors of articles, largely related to traditionally established disciplines. These include broad field classifications into physical sciences, biological sciences, social sciences, and further subtopic classifications within the fields. Focusing on biological sciences, we explore an internal soft-classification structure of articles based only on semantic decompositions of abstracts and bibliographies and compare it with the formal discipline classifications. Our model assumes that there is a fixed number of internal categories, each characterized by multinomial distributions over words (in abstracts) and references (in bibliographies). Soft classification for each article is based on proportions of the article's content coming from each category. We discuss the appropriateness of the model for the PNAS database as well as other features of the data relevant to soft classification.

| S-EPMC387299 | biostudies-literature

The citation merit of scientific publications.

Project description:We propose a new method to assess the merit of any set of scientific papers in a given field based on the citations they receive. Given a field and a citation impact indicator, such as the mean citation or the [Formula: see text]-index, the merit of a given set of [Formula: see text] articles is identified with the probability that a randomly drawn set of [Formula: see text] articles from a given pool of articles in that field has a lower citation impact according to the indicator in question. The method allows for comparisons between sets of articles of different sizes and fields. Using a dataset acquired from Thomson Scientific that contains the articles published in the periodical literature in the period 1998-2007, we show that the novel approach yields rankings of research units different from those obtained by a direct application of the mean citation or the [Formula: see text]-index.

| S-EPMC3496740 | biostudies-literature

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

OmicsDI is an Elixir interoperability service. Learn more ›

Tweets

OmicsDI Databases

PRIDE
PeptideAtlas
MassIVE
JPOST Repository
Physiome Model Repository

EGA
EVA
ENA
LINCS
PAXDB
Cell Collective

MetaboLights
Metabolomics Workbench
MetabolomeExpress
GNPS
BioModels
FAIRDOMHub

ArrayExpress
dbGaP
ExpressionAtlas
GEO
NODE

Information

Databases
Help
API
Contact us
Code on GitHub
Terms of use
Submit Data