Scientists in the US are more likely to publish fake research than their colleagues from other countries, a study has revealed. The findings appear in the November 16 online issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics.
R Grant Steen, Medical Communications Consultants, delved through the PubMed database for every scientific research paper that had been withdrawn in the 2000-2010 period. Research papers that are withdrawn are usually removed from public records. The PubMed database is the only resource for tracking such papers.
The study author found that 788 papers had been retracted in the 10-year-period. Three out of every four had been withdrawn because of a serious error. The rest, 243 in all, had been retracted for fraud i.e. data fabrication or falsification. The biggest chunk of 260 came from US first authors. One-third of these research papers had been attributed to fraud.
The other countries next in the line were the UK, India, Japan, and China. All these countries were accounted for at least 40 research papers being withdrawn.
Fraudsters are usually repeat offenders, Grant Steen found. In fact, over half of the fraudulent research papers were drafted by a first author who was a repeat offender. There also seems to be some collusion among such scientists. It was found that fraudulent research papers often had multiple authors. Moreover, in cases where the repeat offenders were the first author, there were an average of six co-authors. What was significant was that all these co-authors had had at least three retractions of their own in the past.
"The duplicity of some authors is cause for concern," Grant Steen said. "Retraction is the strongest sanction that can be applied to published research, but currently, "[it] is a very blunt instrument used for offences both gravely serious and trivial."
The study concluded that the evidence was consistent with the "deliberate fraud" hypothesis. The research papers retracted because of data fabrication or falsification were a calculated effort to deceive. Such actions are "neither naïve, feckless nor inadvertent," he said.
