After a detailed review of all 2,047 biomedical and life-science research articles, Ferric C. Fang found that only 21.3% of retractions were due to error. However, 67.4% of retractions were due to misconduct. The following are the percentages for each type of misconduct:
-Fraud or suspected fraud (43.4%)
-duplicated publication (14.2%)
-plagiarism (9.8%)
Since 1975, the amount of papers retracted due to fraud has increased 10-fold. I found it interesting that the real problem is not that people have errors in their statistics, but that they just act unethically. It makes me feel like this society has a bigger problem in regards to research than we originally thought.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/27/1212247109.abstract
Wow. These numbers are stunning. When looking for papers to critique I found that many of them were because of doctored images; however, I never imagined that so many were do to a conscious desire to fool the consumer.
ReplyDeleteI don't think it's so much the desire to fool the consumer (being the public), but the pressure to be published and the desire to make a name. Like we talked about in class, the pressures can be very high and if the data doesn't support the researcher, then fudging the numbers might look like the best option. It's also possible that misconduct is easier to spot than error. In the case of Wakefield, his paper was retracted because he lied about the patients being consecutively referred. It wasn't about his weak data and analysis.
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