ARE biomedical scientists becoming more dishonest? That's one way to read a new analysis, which concludes that retractions for fraud or suspected fraud have increased tenfold since 1975.
Arturo Casadevall of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and his colleagues studied the 2050 papers listed as retracted on the PubMed database of biomedical papers. The database references 25 million papers published since the 1940s.
Some of the 2050 papers are explicitly listed as fraudulent, but for others, the reason for the retraction is vague. Information from media reports and the watchdog Retractionwatch.com revealed that at least 158 of these vague retractions were actually due to fraud, suggesting that the extent of the problem was underestimated in earlier assessments (PNAS, doi.org/jf5).
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