'Is the incidence of research fraud increasing?'

[MrAmsterdam]

http://jme.bmj.com/content/37/4/249

JOURNAL OF MEDICAL ETHICS
An international peer-reviewed journal for health professionals and researchers in medical ethics

Research ethics
Paper;Retractions in the scientific literature: is the incidence of research fraud increasing?
R Grant Steen

Background
Scientific papers are retracted for many reasons including fraud (data fabrication or falsification) or error (plagiarism, scientific mistake, ethical problems). Growing attention to fraud in the lay press suggests that the incidence of fraud is increasing.
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Results
Error was more common than fraud (73.5% of papers were retracted for error (or an undisclosed reason) vs 26.6% retracted for fraud). Eight reasons for retraction were identified; the most common reason was scientific mistake in 234 papers (31.5%), but 134 papers (18.1%) were retracted for ambiguous reasons. Fabrication (including data plagiarism) was more common than text plagiarism. Total papers retracted per year have increased sharply over the decade (r=0.96; p<0.001), as have retractions specifically for fraud (r=0.89; p<0.001). Journals now reach farther back in time to retract, both for fraud (r=0.87; p<0.001) and for scientific mistakes (r=0.95; p<0.001). Journals often fail to alert the naïve reader; 31.8% of retracted papers were not noted as retracted in any way.

Conclusions
Levels of misconduct appear to be higher than in the past. This may reflect either a real increase in the incidence of fraud or a greater effort on the part of journals to police the literature. However, research bias is rarely cited as a reason for retraction.

Short answer; yes, fraud is increasing.

Makes me wonder about the journals (if they exist) of mathematical and physics ethics.

[jjohnson]

Apparently a population of around 740 papers was retracted out of some (unstated) larger population of scientific papers reviewed for the purposes of this article. Of those 740 retracted papers, just over 1 quarter were retracted for reasons of fraud. At first reading I had thought that they were showing that 1 out of 4 papers published were retracted for fraud, but we have to be careful with our thinking. Still, that's a sorry statistic, in and of itself. However, if there were only 1000 papers published overfall, this would represent an enormous fraction as fraudulent, whereas if the 740 papers were retracted out of a population of, say, 150,000 papers, then the retraction rate is a pretty low percentage overall, and the 26.6 % which were fraudulent is an even smaller fraction of all papers published. Do you know how many total published papers were considered in this study, from which the 740 were retracted?

It seems to me that if a journal decides to withdraw a paper for any reason, there should be a public notice of it made permanent somehow, so that future authors don't just reference it for their papers. That could end up duping a huge number of unsuspecting authors into citing a paper, or several, which had been retracted but nothing was posted anywhere to warn authors away from an invalidated paper. That borders on negligence, to me. Or laziness. Or...

[kaleswat]

I think personally fraud increase day by day because of illiteracy.

[rboston]

I think that it really increases from day to day because people are not so versed with the area they are putting up for study. I mean, if they are able to make sure of all the steps and components they are to undertake, fraud will be a little out of the picture.

But with the growing thirst for knowledge, it seems that people are just always ready to oblige.

[bredhedden1]

yeah i think that's correct peoples never always right.

[ElecGeekMom]

I would not be surprised if the incidence of fraud is increasing - but - what if there is just more exposure of fraud because scrutiny is wider because the Internet makes it possible for more people to review more papers?