Being forced to retract scientific work can ruin careers – as could be recently seen in German politics. The reasons for a retraction can be classified into two categories with an elementary difference in the moral quality. To err is human, so it may be the case that a scientist just did sloppy work resulting in an erroneous paper. The second category is by far more condemnable: Data fabrication, data falsification and plagiarism will hardly be forgiven by the scientific community.
Among the top 10 retractions of 2010 featured in The Scientist there is the case of the scientist Suresh Radhakrishnan, who worked in an immunology lab at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He was found culpable of falsifying data for almost a decade and 10 papers, which on the whole had been cited 268 times, had to be retracted. As a reaction to his unavoidable layoff, the author wrote an opinion article in The Scientist arguing that he “should not be so casually thrown aside.” But too late, he should count on absolution.
Why do scientists commit fraud? Do they make purposeful attempts to deceive?
An article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics gives suprising insights. Analysing all 788 papers declared as retracted in the PubMed database from 2000 to 2010, the authors could show that papers retracted due to fraud appeared in journals with a significantly higher impact factor (impact factor 8.99) than erroneous papers (impact factor 6.29). In 53% of the fraudulent papers, the first author had written other contracted articles, furthermore fraudulent papers were retracted more slowly than erroneous ones. The authors conclude that scientitists commit research fraud purposefully and that these black sheep are fully aware of the moral implications and the possible consequences.
Interestingly, the ratio between fraudulent and erroneous papers among the retractions was significantly larger for papers authored in the United States compared with the rest of the world. This finding contradicts the author’s original hypothesis that research fraud is more likely to happen in countries with a poor scientific infrastructure. It is pointed out, though, that this finding may be due to the fact that the study exclusively relied on PubMed, an archive maintained by the National Library of Medicine in the USA.
Read more on Retraction Watch.