Why Are So Many Academic Studies Being Retracted?

 Mother Jones - It’s been a hell of a year for science scandals. In July, Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a prominent neuroscientist, announced he would step down after an investigation, prompted by reporting by the Stanford Daily, found that members of his lab had manipulated data or engaged in “deficient scientific practices” in five academic papers on which he’d been the principal author. A month beforehand, internet sleuths publicly accused Harvard professor Francesca Gino—a behavioral scientist studying, among other things, dishonesty—of fraudulently altering data in several papers. (Gino has denied allegations of misconduct.) And the month before, Nobel Prize–winner Gregg Semenza, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, had his seventh paper retracted for “multiple image irregularities.”

Those are just the high-profile examples. Last year, more than 5,000 papers were retracted, with just as many projected for 2023, according to Ivan Oransky, a co-founder of Retraction Watch, a website that hosts a database for academic retractions. In 2002, that number was less than 150. Over the last two decades, even as the overall number of studies published has risen dramatically, the rate of retraction has actually eclipsed the rate of publication.