Retracted Publications in the Drug Literature

Abstract

Recent studies have suggested an increase in the number of retracted scientific publications. It is unclear how broadly the issue of misleading and fraudulent publications pertains to retractions of drug therapy studies. Therefore, we sought to determine the trends and factors associated with retracted publications in drug therapy literature. A PubMed search was conducted to identify retracted drug therapy articles published from 2000-2011. Articles were grouped according to reason for retraction, which was classified as scientific misconduct or error. Scientific misconduct was further divided into data fabrication, data falsification, questions of data veracity, unethical author conduct, and plagiarism. Error was defined as duplicate publication, scientific mistake, journal error, or unstated reasons. Additional data were extracted from the retracted articles, including type of article, funding source, author information, therapeutic area, and retraction issue. A total of 742 retractions were identified from 2000-2011 in the general biomedical literature, and 102 drug studies met our inclusion criteria. Of these, 73 articles (72%) were retracted for a reason classified as scientific misconduct, whereas 29 articles (28%) were retracted for error. Among the 73 articles classified as scientific misconduct, those classified as unethical author conduct (32 articles [44%]) and data fabrication (24 articles [33%]) constituted the majority. The median time from publication of the original article to retraction was 31 months (range 1-130). Fifty percent of retracted articles did not state a funding source, whereas pharmaceutical manufacturer funding accounted for only 13 articles (13%) analyzed. Many retractions were due to repeat offenses by a small number of authors, with nearly 40% of the retracted studies associated with two individuals. We found that a greater proportion of drug therapy articles were retracted for reasons of misconduct and fraud compared with other biomedical studies. It is important for health care practitioners to monitor the literature for retractions so that recommendations for drug therapy and patient management may be modified accordingly.

Persistent Citation of the Only Published Randomised Controlled Trial of Omega-3 Supplementation in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Six Years after Its Retraction

“…This left 76 publications in the final analysis. With the exception of two articles [5,11], all citations were positive (i.e., they did not refer to the article as an example of poor research). The citations occurred in a number of different publication sources (Table 1), with the majority in peer reviewed journal articles.…”

Pharmacy Students’ Ability to Identify Plagiarism After an Educational Intervention

“…This misconception also permeates into literature as 28% of articles retracted from publications from 2000-2011 based on error were because of duplicate publications or self-plagiarism. 9 Of all the types of plagiarism addressed in this study, students demonstrated the greatest amount of difficulty grasping the concept of direct plagiarism, specifically related to citing large amount of text. Prior to the educational intervention, only 26.1% of the 252 students demonstrated awareness about direct plagiarism, which represented the lowest preassessment case score of all 10 cases.…”

“…[4][5][6][7][8][9] An evaluation of 198 second-year medical students who wrote an essay for a medical informatics course found that only 9% did not plagiarize any portion of their submission. The same evaluation revealed the median rate of plagiarism for all submitted assignments was 17%.…”

“…7,8 In 1 study, 15% of the articles retracted in drug-therapy publications were cases classified as scientific misconduct by plagiarism. 9 There is a connection between unethical behavior during undergraduate training and unethical behavior in professional settings, indicating a need to address these issues early in student education. 10 At the academic level, the reasons for why students plagiarize vary and may be intentional or unintentional.…”

Conceptualizing Fraudulent Studies as Viruses: New Models for Handling Retractions

“…Using the same database of retracted papers in the biomedical literature between 2000 and 2010, Samp et al (2012) divided the sample into papers reporting on drug studies (n=102) and categorized the reasons for retractions. Within this subsample, the authors reported that over 60% were retracted for bad data (33% for data fabrication and 28% for error).…”