Alarming Rise In Retractions Of Research Papers
 

For those of you who "trust the media", "trust the experts", "trust the science" or "trust the government", or think data is unbiased or even consistently accurate:

Recent evidence indicates the constant pressure to generate data and publish papers may be affecting the quality of research and fueling retractions of research papers.

In the past decade, there have been more than 39,000 retractions, and the annual number of retractions is growing by around 23% each year.

Nearly half the retractions were due to issues related to the authenticity of the data.

Plagiarism was the second most common reason research papers were retracted, accounting for 16% of retractions.

Fake peer review was another reason why research papers were retracted.

Read the rest here

Even a Nobel prize winner has retracted papers. Where there is money, there is fraud. . People several years ago were submitting obviously fraudulent papers just to see if the peer review process was even working. They all got peer reviewed for publishing. .

Thye system has broken down due to people seeing other fake data papers published, and hopping on board. One masters level economics class had projects to reproduce other paper's results. One of the more well known harvard publishers was caught with a cell or two errors which allowed the hypothesis to pass. He made a comment, that the data mistake didn't alter the outcome. . .

hmmmmmm . . . its all about supporting the outcome

In my opinion, there are too many data to narratives requirements advertisements, and courses.

So much for honesty but the old saying publish or perish is still alive

I suppose some type of grant associated. Pass out grant money like it’s cotton candy know wonder there fraud?

The system seems to be working if it is catching fraud and the like. I would worry when many start looking the other way like when German academics came under the control of totalitarianism. Whoever had the bigger gun and the will to use it controlled the dialog.

The system isn't working if 39,000 papers had to be retracted. I'm assuming they didn't even catch all the fake news. This is a travesty of intellectualism.

The other day, the FBI came out with a report that violent crime was down. Except it didn't include crime stats from several large, dangerous cities that refused to report data. So they just left it out. Everyone who lives in a city knows crime is up, but they insist "the data" shows otherwise.

So why would you believe anything (climate change, crime, inflation, unemployment, drug trials, etc.) if time and again, the "experts" have straight up lied to your face?

Caveat Emptor neighbors.

It looks like the digital availability is making for more scrutiny. It makes me wonder if the older papers were just as bad.

I'd like to know what percentage of fake papers were on climate change.

The only surprising thing about this is how unsurprising it is.

Agree. There is fraud everywhere. Fake studies, fake papers, fake Gucci wallets and purses, even plastic food. Fortunately, the real stuff is still readily available for those who know what they are looking for and systems to find and eliminate the fakes.

So - plagiarism of the article - means that no one is questioning the data, the content, only the author(s). That's good news. It means that 16% of those articles are legit, even if incorrectly attributed.

Another 16.2% is due to duplication. Again - no concern with the content. So that's 32% of articles that has legitimate content and data.

Publication error - 5.5% is due to that. They retracted these because they found mistakes. No lying, no fraud, no shenanigans.

In all, almost half were retracted due to "concerns or issues" about the data itself, which is serious, but it also means that they were, in fact, retracted.

Lack of/fake peer review is equally serious, but significantly less frequent, at only 8.3%.

Now that everyone and their brother is jumping on the AI bandwagon, expect it to get worse, before it gets better.

Yes, not as bad as the outright fraud, but what does that tell you about the integrity of the "researchers"?

You can't trust these people.

Within the context of a patient needing to know what the best medical treatment is for me, I don't care who the researchers are. I care only about the integrity of the data. If 20 different people say the same thing, word for word, and the first one was proven correctly peer reviewed and accurate, I'm okay with it. Let the lawyers and publishers and editors deal with the "who dunnit" of the thing. Just tell me my tylenol really will get rid of my headache and wearing sunscreen really will reduce my risk of skin cancer, and carry on.

Talked with a PhD friend who used to teach at UMASS undergraduates.
He has no desire to read and grade papers anymore, and professors who do grade papers, have to trick the students to catch them using AI. and then run them through plagarism software.

There is a book about this, "The Death of Expertise", by Tom Nichols, a former US Naval war school professor and legislative aid.

And the world keeps moving forward somehow!

Professor grade papers? Thought under post doctoral graduates more less teach class under the guidelines of the professor?

Lying, cheating and stealing have become the norm in the world. People who are suppose to help America are helping themselves. People are told what to do and what to believe they just do it. They don’t take time to think for themselves and figure out what are the truths and what are the lies. No one answers questions anymore they just talk and spit out their own agenda. You only get retractions and the truth when someone gets caught in their lies. We have a lazy and stupid society today and people taking advantage of it.

“Fake peer review” / “Authenticity of the data”

Oh...I’m sorry, I thought I was still on the climate change/global warming/hurricane thread!

LOL !!

I got quite a laugh out of reading the initial posting in this thread. Why? Because it quotes figures from an unknown internet source. Anyone can make up numbers. I prefer to use the standard scientific method of basing my analysis on peer reviewed articles. Yes, I am sure there are some that are the result of fraud or error. The operative term is some as in a few. But, ultimately, these faux "scientific" reports are found out. That is the nature of science. A hypothesis is presented and then subsequent peer reviewed articles will either support or not support the original thesis. But, the original hypothesis or theory is not discarded because we don't want to believe anything.

As for me, I refuse to go back to thinking the universe, particularly the sun, revolves around the earth.

In science, we move on. We do not cast doubt on it, merely because some unknown publication comes up with some number that carries no citations but its own.

I just recently bought a used "vintage" (crazy to think) 1979 Webster Dictionary due to a conversation about what "agnostic" means. 2024 word salad definition results in an agnostic basically being an aethiest. 1979 a sense of openmindedness remained for an agnostic.

Interesting stuff relevant to today in a 1979 dictionary. Worth every bit of the $5 to order it off of thriftbook(dot)com.

Words matter and they are changing meanings all the time to fit narratives. Preserve history. Buy old books. Even the Bible is being changed.

This anti-science nonsense is really getting old. Yes. There are scientists who cheat and lie just like there are in any group whether it is a group of football players, cops, politicians, car drivers, golfers, etc. They are (by far!) not the majority of the groups.

If science were as completely corrupt as people here seem to be thinking, then we wouldn’t be here expressing our ignorant opinions because the technology that results from the vast majority of science would not work. The proof is in the pudding. You have a supercomputer in a tiny package that you call a smart phone. Science works. Period.

One more thing. Many of you think that retracted papers are a sign that science is wrong. No. It’s a sign that science works. That's the difference between science and religion. Scientists seek the truth and when earlier notions are shown to be incorrect, they are abandoned. Religion not so much. The pope imprisoned Galileo because he looked at Venus through a telescope and realized that it was going around the Sun instead of the Earth because it went through phases just like the Moon. Religion, however, clings to old beliefs despite massive evidence to the contrary.

You use critical thinking skills for reasonableness. Otherwise, you’ll believe in nothing and that destroys a society. No matter what in life there are mistakes. Rarely perfection. You don’t base your beliefs on one person, one article, one of anything. You read a lot on the subject from many sources and usually the similarities between them all give you a reasonable truth.

It was caught due to the increased attention gained from colleges supporting antisemitism.

It is one of the few good things that happened from so many supposedly good colleges supporting hate.

Hopefully the lense stays on them from here on out.

Wow....this one took a weird turn!

Google exists and is easy to use. Here are some snippets found in seconds

...scientific publisher Wiley decided to shutter 19 scientific journals after retracting 11,300 sham papers.

When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was “shocked” by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%.

Retraction Watch
 

This was always going on for a long time and its existance is not just recent as reported. But the retractions fortunately are. There are groups that have reviewed the scientific research for the past several decades and exposed the problems. One problem not mentioned is the time it takes for organizations to publish a retraction. In the interim and even after, other researchers still list the problematic paper(s) in their sources. Check out:

Retraction Watch – Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process

Check their faq page and link to the first post.

The Retraction Watch FAQ, including comments policy – Retraction Watch

Why write a blog about retractions? – Retraction Watch

Two infamous cases were from Reuben and Wakefield. These cases still have people citing incorrect conclusions to this day.

Also take a look at:

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False - Wikipedia

by John P.A. Ioannidis
Professor of Medicine (Stanford Prevention Research), of Epidemiology and Population Health

It is highly technical but essentially says that research is very complex, needs corresponding reproduced info to confirm, and since we are human, will always have multiple biases. In other words, there are degrees of truth in everything but teasing it out and confirming is the problem (answering the problem that is asked also helps).

TheWatcher

Nope, this is actually real. Climate "science" is part of the corruption. To be fair, it includes all areas of science.

A corrupt world based on lies and fraud is what you get when your "Golden Rule" is "The Ends Justifies The Means".

On the academic front, my son-in-law the Ag professor, was denied tenure a few years ago when he expressed skepticism that the current warming trend is due to a trace gas in the atmosphere. He foolishly imagined that academic freedom was a thing, and discovered that "settled science" says otherwise.

"It rubs the lotion into its skin. It does whatever it is told"

The generation of fraudulent papers is a booming industry. Providing fraudulent documents to government oversight functions is much cheaper than validating a genuine product designed to benefit people. A fine is imposed when fraud is discovered, but that is just the "cost of doing business." The pharmaceutical industry has been fined billions, but they keep churning out products and peddling them without regard for safety or effectiveness.

Yet ‘we’ still hit CVS and Walgreens et al and fill prescriptions from said industry....knowing this?! Sounds like their ‘plan’ is working! :1rotfl:

Data...unreliable.
 

You must be listening to Scott Adams podcast.😎😍

Let's put this in perspective.

1) Assume that the number of 39,000 retractions is correct for the past 10 years. For 2022 the reported retractions was 6393.

2) A simple google search shows that 2-3 million articles are being published annually. I will take the number of 2.8 million for 2022 which was on the Science.org website. It is based on Scopus and Web of Science publication databases

Just a moment...

3) That means the number of retracted articles is about 0.23% of all the articles published in 2022.

While the growth in retracted papers is disturbing, the system is still working. Having worked in science all my life, I have come across people who publish false data. When it eventually comes to light, that person's reputation is, at the very least, diminished. If we are going to evaluate science, let's at least use the data correctly. How many other professions are as good?

You are talking in generalizations --be specific! What research is in question, that would affect the population of the US and the world? Otherwise, I can't take your sense of alarm serious.

When we were in high school one of our best and most used life courses was Truth in Advertising, along with a civics class. Hopefully it is still being taught but looking at society now, I doubt it. Everyone should attempt to question data & do their own free thinking but without the conspiracy hoopla.

The Torah, however, is unchanged. It is, word for word, exactly as it was when someone first wrote it. While scholars and archeologists debate when exactly that was, the general consensus is that it was at least 150 years before the Christian Christ was alleged to have been born.

New Torahs for synagogues/templars are written by hand, and if there's even a single letter that isn't tilted exactly the correct way, the entire thing is scrapped and they have to start over again.

Wasn’t offered the former...but the latter, Civics, was one of my favorite and since abandoned for the most part. You knew every level of government....especially your local school boards and councils, and their elected members. It’s sad because most today can’t even tell you who their elected representatives are short of the presidency.

I don't think most "trust" what's published. Most papers are published for peer review, critique, compete, etc. They are meant for the professionals in that field. Reporters like to jump on things for their news. Anyone would be mistaken to trust that. I would think most folks take it as information on an evolving subject & change often like political polls.

Good solid studies are hard to come by. And even with the good ones it is well known in the world of statistics that one cannot rely on the results as being absolute. More good studies are needed to confirm.

It depends on where the work is being published and the discipline. The peer review process that my papers went through before being published in hard science journals was both extensive and lengthy. I suspect much of the retractions were in “softer” sciences. Regardless, this thread is essentially click bait meant to rile people up. I suspect the OP has never published a research paper.

"May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do about It" by Alex Edmans on Amazon

Unless you have had a class in statistics you may not know how to interpret what you hear and read. A good recent example were the efficacy numbers that were published with the first release of the COVID-19 vaccines. I’m pretty sure that the vast majority of people misinterpreted the numbers. There was no malicious intent by anyone. The developers speak a different language than non-researchers.

So if abc/nbc/cnn/msnbc/cbs and any of the other fake news channels say the same thing, then it’s true? All these fake news outlets get together each day to come up with the “theme” or “word” of the day to bash a person. It’s funny, you can watch 10 mins of each of these outlets during the day and see what the common “theme”/“word” is and I know millions of people believe this garbage.