Quality not quantity to tackle fraud - The Irish Times - Thu, Oct 18, 2012

Quality not quantity to tackle fraud - The Irish Times - Thu, Oct 18, 2012: "he pressure to secure grants can force scientists to publish work that offers little value – and can lead to misconduct

SCIENCE IS A human activity, and it is not immune to misconduct. The latest review of misconduct, by FC Fang, RG Steen and A Casadevall, has been published online this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The review highlights an increase in misconduct by scientists, a worrying trend that calls for urgent reforms in the system to reduce the pressures that tempt some scientists to misbehave.

Fang and colleagues analysed the number and frequency of retraction of flawed publications from scientific journals in the biomedical and life-science fields. They used the PubMed database that references more than 25 million articles published since the 1940s. PubMed is maintained by the US Library of Medicine. They analysed the 2,047 articles indexed by PubMed as retracted on May 3rd, 2012. Retracted articles were classified under the headings fraud (data fabrication or falsification), suspected fraud, plagiarism, duplicate publication (publishing the same data in two or more journals), error, unknown, or other reasons."

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