Falsified data is the main reason biomedical and life science research articles are retracted, a problem that has increased 10-fold in the past three decades, a review of studies found. About 43 percent of the articles were rescinded because of made-up or manipulated data, 14 percent were retracted because the study appeared in more than one publication and about 10 percent because of plagiarism, according to the report published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study is the most comprehensive analysis of retracted articles, said Arturo Casadevall, the study’s senior author.
