Most Papers Retracted for Misconduct

摘要

Geography helps tell the story of why biomedical papers are retracted-or so suggests a new study published online on 1 October in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences (PNAS). Microbiologists Ferric Fang and Arturo Casadevall, along with medical writer R. Grant Steen, examined the reasons for retractions from multiple angles, and they found that the explanations partly track with the country where the research was done. Most papers retracted for fraud or suspected fraud involved work conducted in the United States. But when plagiarism and duplicate publications are the reason for retractions, locales such as China take a bigger slice of the pie.