'Retraction epidemic' of scientific papers mostly due to intentional fraud says PNAS. Much fraud likely yet undiscovered and unretracted. Current culture rewards paper publishing disproportionately

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3/15/13, "World View: Misconduct Skyrockets in Published Scientific Papers," Breitbart, John J. Xenakis

"Misconduct skyrockets in published scientific papers

In another example of surging fraud, a study of 2,047 papers that had been published in biomedical journals and later retracted, the researchers found that the retractions were not due to simple errors, but in 67% of the cases were due to misconduct -- fraud, suspected fraud, duplicate publication, and plagiarism. The number of retractions began to skyrocket in 2005, which is exactly the same time that corruption and fraud in financial institutions began to skyrocket.

Once again, I've seen this kind of fraud and corruption personally in the computer industry, and I've reported on in financial services and in media and in Washington many, many times. Nothing like this was true in the 1990s, but today there is literally no aspect of life in America anymore that isn't polluted with fraud and corruption. The only "good news" is that the same thing is true in China, and probably worse. Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences and newswise.com."

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9/27/12, "Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications," PNAS 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."

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9/28/12, "Misconduct, Not Error, Accounts For Most Scientific Paper Retractions," Newswise.com

"New Study Finds 10-Fold Increase in Fraud-Related Retractions
 
"In sharp contrast to previous studies suggesting that errors account for the majority of retracted scientific papers, a new analysis—the most comprehensive of its kind—has found that misconduct is responsible for two-thirds of all retractions. In the paper, misconduct included fraud or suspected fraud, duplicate publication and plagiarism. The paper’s findings show as a percentage of all scientific articles published, retractions for fraud or suspected fraud have increased 10-fold since 1975. The study, from a collaboration between three scientists including one at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“Biomedical research has become a winner-take-all game—one with perverse incentives that entice scientists to cut corners and, in some instances, falsify data or commit other acts of misconduct,” said senior author Arturo Casadevall, M.D., Ph.D., the Leo and Julia Forchheimer Chair and professor of microbiology & immunology and professor of medicine at Einstein. Dr. Casadevall is also editor-in-chief of the journal mBio....

“What’s troubling is that the more skillful the fraud, the less likely that it will be discovered, so there likely are more fraudulent papers out there that haven’t yet been detected and retracted,” said Dr. Casadevall.

Earlier studies that underestimated the extent of scientific misconduct relied solely on the journals’ retraction notices, which are written by the papers’ authors, according to Dr. Casadevall. “Many of those notices are wrong,” he said. “Authors commonly write, ‘We regret we have to retract our paper because the work is not reproducible,’ which is not exactly a lie. The work indeed was not reproducible — because it was fraudulent. Researchers try to protect their labs and their reputations, and these retractions are written in such a way that you often don’t know what really happened.”

The PNAS study also found that journals with higher impact factors (a measure of a publication’s influence in scientific circles) had especially high rates of retractions. Dr. Casadevall attributes the growing number of retracted papers to the prevailing culture in science, which disproportionately rewards scientists for publishing large numbers of papers and getting them published in prestigious journals.

“Particularly if you get your papers accepted in certain journals, you’re much more likely to get recognition, grants, prizes and better jobs or promotions,” he said. “Scientists are human, and some of them will succumb to this pressure, especially when there’s so much competition for funding. Perhaps our most telling finding is what happened after 2005, which is when the number of retractions began to skyrocket. That’s exactly when NIH funding began to get very tight.”"...

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