There is an Aesop's Fable you may be familiar with, titled The Boy Who Cried Wolf, about a shepherd boy who shouts out to the local villagers that a wolf was attacking his flock, but when the villagers rushed to the scene, there was no wolf to be found. The boy did this multiple times, and each time, there was no wolf to be found. When a wolf actually did come to attack the boy's flock, the villagers had ignored the cries, thinking that it was a false alarm, and the boy's flock was destroyed by the wolf. The moral of this story is, at its root, about how being caught fabricating observations, in this case about a wolf, will inevitably lead to an erosion of trust in other claims.
Fabrication is making up data or results and recording them in the research record. Fabrication in research typically concerns the construction of data to fit or conform to a given test or confirm a particular hypothesis. Fabrication is no small issue in the sciences, and publishing work or releasing medicines based on fabricated results can bring big rewards. There exist numerous examples of fabrication in science, medicine, and engineering, many of which likely go undetected.
"Biomedical research has become a winner-take-all game — one with perverse incentives that entice scientists to cut corners and, in some instances, falsify data or commit other acts of misconduct," says senior author Arturo Casadevall of Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
The study reviewed 2,047 papers retracted from the biomedical literature through May 2012 and consulted the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Research Integrity and Retractionwatch.com to establish the cause.
And the team found that about 21 percent of the retractions were attributable to error, while 67 percent were due to misconduct, including fraud or suspected fraud (43 percent), duplicate publication (14 percent), and plagiarism (10 percent). Miscellaneous or unknown reasons accounted for the remaining 12 percent.
"What's troubling is that the more skillful the fraud, the less likely that it will be discovered, so there likely are more fraudulent papers out there that haven't yet been detected and retracted," says Casadevall.