Falsified papers in high-impact journals were slow to retract and indistinguishable from nonfraudulent papers

Abstract

Objective

The aim was to evaluate papers retracted due to falsification in high-impact journals.

Study Design and Setting

We selected articles retracted due to allegations of falsification in January 1, 1980 to March 1, 2006 from journals with impact factor >10 and >30,000 annual citations. We evaluated characteristics of these papers and misconduct-involved authors and assessed whether they correlated with time to retraction. We also compared retracted articles vs. matched nonretracted articles in the same journals.

Results

Fourteen eligible journals had 63 eligible retracted articles. Median time from publication to retraction was 28 months; it was 79 months for articles where a senior researcher was implicated in the misconduct vs. 22 months when junior researchers were implicated (log-rank P < 0.001). For the 25 implicated authors, the median time from the first publication of a fraudulent paper to the first retraction was 34 months, again with a clear difference according to researcher rank (log-rank P = 0.001). Retracted articles didn't differ from matched nonretracted papers in citations received within 12 months, number of authors, country, funding, or field, but were twofold more likely to have multinational authorship (P = 0.049).

Conclusions

Retractions due to falsification can take a long time, especially when senior researchers are implicated. Fraudulent articles are not obviously distinguishable from nonfraudulent ones.

Introduction

Serious scientific misconduct [1] alarms the scientific and wider community. Publications of fraudulent data distract from the truth, erode trust in scientific research, may lead to adoption of otherwise ineffective or harmful interventions, damage reputations of people and institutes, and create stirs in the news. Several authors have discussed at times one or several cases of misconduct, typically when yet another serious case is revealed [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]. However, to our knowledge there is no systematic analysis of scientific misconduct cases that have resulted in retraction of scientific articles.

Of the different types of misconduct, falsification is more egregious and typically affects the veracity of the report more than plagiarism, faked author or ethics approval, or duplication. Given the long-standing resistance to retract published articles, any empirical survey of retracted papers is likely to capture only the tip of the iceberg of fraudulent articles. This is an issue for all types of fraudulent articles, and this may be an even more prominent problem for other types of misconduct besides falsification. Moreover, even for falsification, most of the revealed cases pertain to publications in major journals. Falsification may affect also journals with lesser impact, but usually this is less visible and less subject to public and peer scrutiny, and thus probably more difficult to detect. Regardless, falsification in major journals may be especially harmful for the cause of science.

Here, we performed an empirical evaluation that had three aims. First, we aimed to describe the characteristics of the articles and authors implicated in retractions due to falsification in top-cited journals since 1980. This is probably a select subgroup of fraudulent papers: it represents the fraction of fraudulent publications that has been revealed, and among these, a smaller fraction where the falsification was decisively dealt with retraction. However, this is an important set of cases to study. Second, we aimed to examine how long it took for these publications to be retracted, and whether any determinants correlated with time to retraction. Third, we aimed to evaluate whether these retracted articles differed in any major characteristics against matched nonretracted articles published at the same time in the same journals.