Plagiarism, Fraud, Retracted Papers, and Ethics in the Post-Pandemic Era: The State of the Art

According to Brainard and Yu (2018), the number of articles retracted by scientific journals had increased 10-fold during the previous 10 years. Fraud accounted for some 60% of those retractions. However, retraction may be due to other reasons. For instance, during the pandemic surge, retractions were necessary because the novelty of the virus made scientists to continuously update their knowledge about it. Furthermore, the more scientists published papers about Coronavirus-19, the quicker was the publication progress. The need for having up-to-date information about modelling epidemic, controlling spread, diagnostic and testing, as well as mortality, on the one hand has caused an augmented speed on typical peer-review systems (the hardest to sustain ever); on the other hand, a more in-depth knowledge about the virus itself led to retract papers whenever any information about it was overpassed by new knowledge. This talk will try to report the state-of-the-art about plagiarism and retractions in the post-pandemic era. References Brainard, J., and J. You. 2018. “What a Massive Database of Retracted Papers Reveals about Science Publishing’s ‘Death Penalty’.” Science. 25 (1): 1–5. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/10/what-massive-database-retracted-papers-reveals-about-science-publishing-s-death-penalty