The Majority Of Retracted Papers Are Due To Misconduct, Not Honest Mistakes
Piltdown Hoaxers John CookeA recent study finds that only 21 percent of all retracted papers were due to legitimate error rather than scientific fraud. It feels like not a week goes by without a scientific paper getting retracted. The article authors issue apologetic statements of "mistaken" data or "submitted the wrong photo" or whatever, and everyone shuffles around feeling embarrassed on behalf of science for awhile and that seems to be that. Turns out, most of the time those "mistakes" are intentional. A recent study of retracted papers by Arturo Casadevall, Ferric Fang and R. Grant Steen has uncovered that 67 percent article retractions -- papers that the journal or researchers, or both, disavow -- are due to scientific misconduct. Fang et al. looked through the PubMed database at 2,047 article retractions back to 1977, when a paper published in 1973 got the axe, then cross-referenced those retractions with investigations...