TY - JOUR
T1 - Plagiarism, Fake Peer-Review, and Duplication
T2 - Predominant Reasons Underlying Retractions of Iran-Affiliated Scientific Papers
AU - Kamali, Negin
AU - Talebi Bezmin Abadi, Amin
AU - Rahimi, Farid
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, Springer Nature B.V.
PY - 2020/12
Y1 - 2020/12
N2 - Retractions of scientific papers published by some Iran-affiliated scientists in the preceding decade have attracted much attention and publicity; however, the reasons for these retractions have not been documented. We searched the Retraction Watch Database to enumerate the retracted Iran-affiliated papers from December 2001 to December 2019 and aimed to outline the predominant reasons for retractions. The reasons included fake peer-review, authorship dispute, fabricated data, plagiarism, conflict of interest, erroneous data, and duplication. The Fisher’s exact test was used to investigate the associations between retractions and their underlying reasons. We selected P < 0.05 to indicate the statistically significant differences. We found 697 retracted papers. Duplication (27%), plagiarism (26%), and fake peer-review (21%) were the most frequent reasons for retractions. Our study highlights the importance of urgent intervention to prevent the misconduct and questionable research practices that lead to retractions in Iran. Continually educating the scientists and postgraduate students about the ethics and norms of scientific publishing is an important measure to ensure publication of reliable, worthy, and impactful papers.
AB - Retractions of scientific papers published by some Iran-affiliated scientists in the preceding decade have attracted much attention and publicity; however, the reasons for these retractions have not been documented. We searched the Retraction Watch Database to enumerate the retracted Iran-affiliated papers from December 2001 to December 2019 and aimed to outline the predominant reasons for retractions. The reasons included fake peer-review, authorship dispute, fabricated data, plagiarism, conflict of interest, erroneous data, and duplication. The Fisher’s exact test was used to investigate the associations between retractions and their underlying reasons. We selected P < 0.05 to indicate the statistically significant differences. We found 697 retracted papers. Duplication (27%), plagiarism (26%), and fake peer-review (21%) were the most frequent reasons for retractions. Our study highlights the importance of urgent intervention to prevent the misconduct and questionable research practices that lead to retractions in Iran. Continually educating the scientists and postgraduate students about the ethics and norms of scientific publishing is an important measure to ensure publication of reliable, worthy, and impactful papers.
KW - Duplication
KW - Ethics in publishing
KW - Fake peer-review
KW - Iran
KW - Manuscript
KW - Retraction of publication
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85095119765&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s11948-020-00274-6
DO - 10.1007/s11948-020-00274-6
M3 - Article
SN - 1353-3452
VL - 26
SP - 3455
EP - 3463
JO - Science and Engineering Ethics
JF - Science and Engineering Ethics
IS - 6
ER -