Dental researchers plagiarised and fabricated data
Questionable research and scientific misconduct revealed.
Studies have revealed high rates of questionable research practices and scientific misconduct among academic researchers, resulting in retraction of scientific publications.
A scoping review has been undertaken by researchers at the Academic Centre for Dentistry Amsterdam (ACTA), aimed at analysing the characteristics of retracted publications with a focus on dental research.
Electronic searches were performed on PubMed Central, Web of Science, and the Retraction Watch website and 333 retracted articles were analysed.
The majority of these publications were written by authors from Asia (60.6%), particularly India (22.2%) and China (20.1%). More than half of the publications were retracted because of various forms of misconduct (57.4%), such as plagiarism, data duplication and data fabrication.
Oral pathology was the subdiscipline in dentistry with the highest number of retracted publications (26.4%) and animal studies were the most prevalent study design among retracted publications (14.1%).
The researchers concluded: “A large number of publications in dental research have been retracted during the past two decades, primarily to instances of scientific misconduct. Researchers, journal editors and academic institutions should prioritise the prevention and detection of misconduct to uphold the credibility and reliability of published dental literature.”