Academic fraud

The Economist has a nice article on a different type of academic fraud: "Looks Good on Paper". I guess we all got "invitations" to present our work in Economics and everything else style conferences, here is how to push that further...

"these criminals were producing something more intellectual: fake scholarly articles which they sold to academics, and counterfeit versions of existing medical journals in which they sold publication slots.

As China tries to take its seat at the top table of global academia, the criminal underworld has seized on a feature in its research system: the fact that research grants and promotions are awarded on the basis of the number of articles published, not on the quality of the original research. This has fostered an industry of plagiarism, invented research and fake journals that Wuhan University estimated in 2009 was worth $150m, a fivefold increase on just two years earlier."

They cite a study from PNAS:

Ferric C. Fang R. Grant Steen, and Arturo Casadevall, "Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications"

Their abstract includes:

"A detailed review of all 2,047 biomedical and life-science research articles indexed by PubMed as retracted on May 3, 2012 revealed that only 21.3% of retractions were attributable to error. In contrast, 67.4% of retractions were attributable to misconduct, including fraud or suspected fraud (43.4%), duplicate publication (14.2%), and plagiarism (9.8%)."

The main picture is