Science has the power to improve health, strengthen economies and shed light on the unknown throughout the universe, but a small and growing number of research papers are being retracted by journals for a myriad of reasons, including falsified evidence, conflicts of interest and plagiarism, specialists in science fraud say. The distortion of research is something that Dr. Purnima Madhivanan, associate professor in the Department of Health Promotion Sciences at the University of Arizona, wants to end. In an article published this month in JAMA Internal Medicine, she and a colleague suggested that meta-analyses be retrospectively purged of results from retracted research, recommending that meta-studies should be given a defined life cycle and periodically checked to better ensure the research they included in the analysis had not been retracted or corrected since time of publication.
Related
