Retractions and Corrections From Scientific Misconduct

An interesting article appears in the Journal of Medical Ethics, January 2013, vol. 39, pp. 46-50, titled “Scientific retractions and corrections related to misconduct findings,” by David B Resnik and Gregg E Dinse. The authors explored 208 closed cases involving official findings of research misconduct published by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity from 1992 to 2011 in order to determine how often scientists mention in a retraction or correction notice that there was an ethical problem with the article. The issue of fraudulent articles appear in the scientific literature is a problem as many articles and the data within them can be falsified. See for example Industry Bias in Biomedical Science and The Right to Health and Information. The authors mention that typically when a retraction or correction is made to an article they are usually electronically linked to … Read more