Retractions are coming thick and fast: it's time for publishers to act | Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky | Science | theguardian.com

"News that Peter Chen, an engineering researcher in Taiwan, managed to game the peer review system and sneak into print at least 60 publications in a single journal is certain to raise serious questions about the integrity of the process by which scientific publishers vet papers. Those doubts only get stronger when you consider that this wasn’t the first time a scientist attempted such a scheme. In 2012, a Korean plant chemist was caught cheating the peer review process and was forced to retract 28 articles. (He had already retracted seven others for different reasons, making a total of 35.) The publishing giant Elsevier retracted 11 papers the same year after what it called a 'hack' of its editorial publishing system. The publisher Springer has also had at least two cases of retraction after it was discovered that the papers had been peer-reviewed by one of the authors. That’s a total of more than 100 retractions for bogus peer review as a result of vulnerabilities in publishers’ editorial systems. To be fair, this represents only a tiny fraction of roughly 1.4m articles published by science journals each year. But retractions for all reasons, from honest error to plagiarism to the outright faking of data, are on the rise. The number of retractions in the first decade of the 21st century was 10 times larger than that at the end of the 20th. And that doesn’t include a couple of recent extremely high-volume recidivists, such as Chen, the Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel (with 54 retracted papers) and Yoshitaka Fujii, whose 183 or so retractions make him the worst known offender. What drives scientists to commit fraud? The common theme of many of these stories is that researchers felt great pressure to publish papers, and get them cited, because those are the currency of tenure and grants. It’s unclear, however, as a 2013 study in the journal PLOS Medicine noted, whether the growth in retractions “reflects an increase in publication of flawed articles or an increase in the rate at which flawed articles are withdrawn". Not all of these take-backs could have been prevented with better peer review or stricter scrutiny from editors. But some of them could, whether by plagiarism screening programs such as CrossCheck, or even Google, which in our experience proves pretty useful as a first-pass system for identifying misused text. The problem is knottier when it comes to finding evidence of falsified results or doctored figures and images. Although the human eye isn’t particularly good at catching dodgy images, emerging software can pick up signs of image manipulation such as reversal, rotation, duplication and other common tricks of the trade. These programs aren’t quite ready for widespread use, but the time is coming. So what’s to be done? ..."