Misconduct Accounts for the Majority of Retracted Scientific Publications

By Ferric C. Fang, R. Grant Steen, and Arturo Casadevall Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Oct. 1, 2012 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%).