Fears about how much research funding is being wasted on fraudulent projects may be overstated.
A study, published this week in the open access journal eLife, found that the amount of National Institutes of Health funding associated with papers retracted for misconduct accounted for less than 0.01 per cent of the agency’s total budget between 1992 and 2012.
The study was carried out by four authors, including Ferric Fang, professor of microbiology at the University of Washington, and Arturo Casadevall, a professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York. Previous investigations by these two authors have revealed that retractions have shot up over the past two decades, especially in high-profile journals, and that most retractions are the result of misconduct.
But their latest paper finds that misconduct rulings by the Office of Research Integrity - which led to 149 retractions between 1992 and 2012 - accounted for just $47 million (£28 million) of NIH funding, compared to a total spend of $452 billion.
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