Misconduct, Not Mistakes, Causes Most Retractions of Scientific Papers
Scientific misconduct, and not honest mistakes, account for more than two-thirds of retractions, a paper published today online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggests. The authors, microbiologists and journal editors Arturo Casadevall and Ferric Fang, set out to classify the errors that prompt researchers to yank published work—and came up with what they say is a surprising result.
Casadevall and Fang, who are fascinated by scientific integrity in publication, wanted to follow up on work published last year. Medical writer R. Grant Steen had reported in the Journal of Medical Ethics that 73.5% of 742 papers retracted between 2000 and 2010 were pulled because of errors. "What I was interested in was to see if we could understand the sources of error," says Casadevall, who runs a lab at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, and is editor-in-chief of mBio. That way, he and Fang thought, "we may find a way to improve science" by giving researchers a heads up about where the most common pitfalls lie.
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Scientific misconduct, and not honest mistakes, account for more than two-thirds of retractions, a paper published today online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggests. The authors, microbiologists and journal editors Arturo Casadevall and Ferric Fang, set out to classify the errors that prompt researchers to yank published work—and came up with what they say is a surprising result.
Casadevall and Fang, who are fascinated by scientific integrity in publication, wanted to follow up on work published last year. Medical writer R. Grant Steen had reported in the Journal of Medical Ethics that 73.5% of 742 papers retracted between 2000 and 2010 were pulled because of errors. "What I was interested in was to see if we could understand the sources of error," says Casadevall, who runs a lab at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, and is editor-in-chief of mBio. That way, he and Fang thought, "we may find a way to improve science" by giving researchers a heads up about where the most common pitfalls lie.
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