Misconduct, Not Error, Is the Main Cause of Scientific Retractions

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday October 2, 2012 @06:03AM from the fake-data-looks-much-better-than-real-data dept.

ananyo writes "One of the largest-ever studies of retractions has found that two-thirds of retracted life-sciences papers were stricken from the scientific record because of misconduct such as fraud or suspected fraud — and that journals sometimes soft-pedal the reason. The study contradicts the conventional view that most retractions of papers in scientific journals are triggered by unintentional errors. The survey examined all 2,047 articles in the PubMed database that had been marked as retracted by 3 May this year. But rather than taking journals' retraction notices at face value, as previous analyses have done, the study used secondary sources to pin down the reasons for retraction if the notices were incomplete or vague. The analysis revealed that fraud or suspected fraud was responsible for 43% of the retractions. Other types of misconduct — duplicate publication and plagiarism — accounted for 14% and 10% of retractions, respectively. Only 21% of the papers were retracted because of error (abstract)."

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Re:Publish or perish by blueg3 · 2012-10-02 06:35 · Score: 4, Insightful

Journals don't only publish papers reporting "positive results," whatever that may be. Even if your study comes out a way you didn't expect, if you did it right, you should still be able to get it published. There's something beyond publish or perish that is at work here.
That's what you might think, but getting (most) journals to publish negative results is very difficult.
Re:Publish or perish by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-02 06:37 · Score: 5, Insightful

Journals don't only publish papers reporting "positive results," whatever that may be
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAhahahaha... ha... oh, oh I'm sorry, but that's funny.

Yes. Journals have a very long history of not publishing 'negative results'. (id est: "We tested to see if X happened under situation Y, but no it doesn't.") Mostly because it's not 'interesting'.

If you want a good example of this, check out the medical field, where the studies which don't pan out aren't published, the ones which do are, leading to severely misleading clinical data, and it leads to problematic results.