from allgov.com: When journals are forced to issue retractions about inaccurate information in articles and papers, the cause of the errors are largely the result of misconduct by scientists and academics.

A new study of 2,047 retractions of biomedical and life-science research articles published between 1973 and May 3, 2012, says that only 21.3% of the time are retractions the product of honest errors.

That means misconduct is behind three-quarters of retractions. The misconduct includes suspected fraud (43.4%), duplicate publication (14.2%) and plagiarism (9.8%).

“What’s troubling is that the more skillful the fraud, the less likely that it will be discovered, so there likely are more fraudulent papers out there that haven’t yet been detected and retracted,” said study coauthor Dr. Arturo Casadevall of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx.