Scientific Fraud and Misconduct Appear to Be Escalating — They Now Account for 67 Percent of Retracted Science and Medical Research Articles — Worse, Sophisticated Fraud Has Not Yet Been Uncovered

© 2012 Peter Free

 

02 October 2012

 

 

Citation —to the study

 

Ferric C. Fang, R. Grant Steen, and Arturo Casadevall, Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [PNAS], doi: 10.1073/pnas.1212247109 (early online publication, 01 October 2012)

 

 

The ethical crumbling of American culture continues, even in areas where seeking truth was once highly valued

 

From the paper’s 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%).

 

The percentage of scientific articles retracted because of fraud has increased approximately 10-fold since 1975.

 

© 2012 Ferric C. Fang, R. Grant Steen, and Arturo Casadevall, Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [PNAS], doi: 10.1073/pnas.1212247109 (early online publication, 01 October 2012) (at Abstract) (paragraph split)

 

 

Why should we care?

 

When science and medicine are falsified, “we” made make bad decisions based on false data and erroneous proofs.  In clinical medicine, this harms patients:

 

"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. . . . 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.”

 

© 2012 Deirdre Branley, Misconduct, Not Error, Accounts For Most Scientific Paper Retractions, Albert Einstein College of Medicine — Yeshiva University (01 October 2012) (paragraph split)

 

 

Guess who monitors these data-falsifying liars? — You guessed it, the same people who benefit from the lie-telling

 

I have frequently discussed the perverse incentives that motivate prestigious science and medical journals to participate in contributing to bad scientific behavior.  See here, here, and here, for example.

 

Senior author Dr. Casadevall sounded the same theme at the conclusion of his study:

 

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."

 

© 2012 Deirdre Branley, Misconduct, Not Error, Accounts For Most Scientific Paper Retractions, Albert Einstein College of Medicine — Yeshiva University (01 October 2012) (paragraphs split)

 

 

The moral? — We built this system, and it ain’t pretty

 

Every time we turn around, we see voluminous evidence of a greed-based culture that values self-interest above all else.  With the predictable result that one sin follows another, everywhere we look.

 

Truth and personal honor are on the run, culture-wide, and pretty much already out of sight.

 

If we keep sitting on our complacent behinds, we’re gonna go down with the ship.  Or burn in hell.  Take your metaphorical pick.