The year just concluded was a very hot time for the growing indoor sport of retracting articles published in various scientific journals for various reasons. These reason include, but are not limited to: making up data, stealing other people’s data, faking images, duplicate publication, using colleagues’ names as co-authors without knowledge and permission, and common or garden plagiarism. While a number of the cases resulted from the action of lower-ranked personnel in the food chain, a number too were the work of PI’s who got caught faking, duping, etc. Our good friends at Retraction Watch have been keep an eye on this for a while now, and they have a year’s end tally:
Read through the whole post, but don’t forget to go back to the RW web site and check out some of the items published after the item above. Some well-established fish have been shown to have just made up data used in grant applications and publications. It’s much easier to do it that way.