A Retrospective Analysis of the Trend of Retracted Publications in the Field of Biomedical and Life Sciences

The original intention of scientific publication seems to have changed from sharing knowledge to becoming an assessment tool for researchers and research-based institutions. Due to this kind of pressure in the "publish or perish" atmosphere of modern science, the temptation to publish flawed or even fraudulent data is large. This study looked at the trend of 303 retracted publications from 44 authors to see the ration of single-authored articles to the total journal publications being retracted, and to examine the different approaches adopted by the authors who had previous publications retracted. The study also looked at the time difference between articles published before 2000 and after 2000. The author found that there was a much shorter time for the retracting of fraudulent papers in those published after 2000. This could potentially could be because publicly accessible databases like PubMed make detecting these fraudulent publications easier. The different approaches adopted by authors who had previous publications retracted are also discussed.