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- A detailed review of all 2,047 biomedical and life-science research
articles indexed by PubMed as retracted on May 3, 2012 revealed
that only 21.3%of retractionswere attributable to error. In contrast,
67.4% of retractions were attributable to misconduct, including
fraud or suspected fraud (43.4%), duplicate publication (14.2%), and
plagiarism (9.8%). Incomplete, uninformative or misleading retraction
announcements have led to a previous underestimation of the
role of fraud in the ongoing retraction epidemic. The percentage of
scientific articles retracted because of fraud has increased ∼10-fold
since 1975. Retractions exhibit distinctive temporal and geographic
patterns that may reveal underlying causes.