Scientific misconduct is more common than we care to admit.

Created by Ivan Oransky in 2010, with information site Adam Marcus Pull out the watch, which specializes in scientific integrity, as well as the most comprehensive database of articles pulled from the scholarly (retracted) literature. The WoodNext Foundation, donations and licenses to use the database allow funding for these activities. Ivan Oransky, volunteered at Rollback controlHe is also the editor-in-chief of an autism media outlet, Domainand Professor of Journalism at New York University.

Why did you launch a media specialized in scientific integrity?

Few media outlets, in 2010, were interested in scientific misconduct, fraud, or articles being retracted. A story showed us that there is a real need to report on these issues. Adam Marcus revealed in an investigation that a researcher had fabricated clinical trial data on a painkiller, Which will land him in jail. The offender articles were retracted after these revelations, but the editors have published, to accompany decisions and explanations incorrect or incomplete. We then considered it necessary to tell other stories to solve these issues of lack of information or just to report that there weren’t too many articles to pull.

what is the situation ?

Our database lists about 41,000 articles that have been pulled, far more than other databases. PubMed has only 13,000, and for France we count 519 articles, 40% of which are only signed by authors from French institutions. The UK has two and a half times as much.

The total percentage increases over time and comes to approximately 0.1% of the approximately three million articles published each year. But the number of cases of misconduct is definitely higher. First because publishers act slowly – when they act. In a recent study, we estimated that article retract times were approximately two years. It is really very long.

In addition, A study showed, in 2009, that 2% of researchers themselves admitted to cheating. Which is more than a 0.1% decline…

What are the main reasons for withdrawing an item?

Dozens of reasons have been identified, such as conflicts of interest, ethics violations, errors by the publisher, and so on. But two-thirds of retractions are related to scientific misconduct, the most serious of which are data falsification (which makes the result better than it is), data fabrication (invention) and plagiarism. The first category is also very diverse and contains suspicious photo manipulations or photo reuses in many articles related to different experiences.

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