The Retraction Epidemic

In the Washington Post, Peter Whoriskey writes about the rising incidence of fraud in research labs:

It may be impossible for anyone from outside to know the extent of the problems in the Nature paper. But the incident comes amid a phenomenon that some call a “retraction epidemic.”

Last year, research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the percentage of scientific articles retracted because of fraud had increased tenfold since 1975.

The same analysis reviewed more than 2,000 retracted biomedical papers and found that 67 percent of the retractions were attributable to misconduct, mainly fraud or suspected fraud.

One of the less-obvious downsides of academic fraud:

The trouble is that a delayed response — or none at all — leaves other scientists to build upon shaky work. [Ferric] Fang said he has talked to researchers who have lost months by relying on results that proved impossible to reproduce.

Moreover, as [Adam] Marcus and [Ivan] Oransky have noted, much of the research is funded by taxpayers. Yet when retractions are done, they are done quietly and “live in obscurity,” meaning taxpayers are unlikely to find out that their money may have been wasted.