Financial costs and personal consequences of research misconduct resulting in retracted publications
Open accessAbstract
The number of retracted scientific articles has been increasing. Most retractions are associated with research misconduct, entailing financial costs to funding sources and damage to the careers of those committing misconduct. We sought to calculate the magnitude of these effects. Data relating to retracted manuscripts and authors found by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) to have committed misconduct were reviewed from public databases. Attributable costs of retracted manuscripts, and publication output and funding of researchers found to have committed misconduct were determined. We found that papers retracted due to misconduct accounted for approximately $58 million in direct funding by the NIH between 1992 and 2012, less than 1% of the NIH budget over this period. Each of these articles accounted for a mean of $392,582 in direct costs (SD $423,256). Researchers experienced a median 91.8% decrease in publication output and large declines in funding after censure by the ORI.
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Retractions impose substantial financial and scientific costs.
“retractions themselves impose substantial financial and scientific costs (Stern et al., 2014).”
From FLAWS: A Benchmark for Error Identification and Localization in Scientific Papers (2025) · cites this paper as Stern et al., 2014
The Abstract reports substantial funding attributable to papers retracted for misconduct and a sharp decline in censured researchers’ publication output. The Discussion section ‘Research misconduct entails other financial costs’ also describes potentially unproductive follow-on research, but says those indirect costs were not measured. The claim extends these findings about misconduct-related retractions to retractions generally and states the scientific costs more firmly than the paper establishes. (LLM, conf=0.84)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredDamage to reputation after retracting papers for any reason plays a crucial role in faculty recruitment and philanthropy efforts.
“Damage to reputation after retracting papers for any reason also plays a crucial role in faculty recruitment and philanthropy efforts [16].”
From Genetic Insights into the Economic Toll of Cell Line Misidentification: A Comprehensive Review (2026) · cites this paper as [16]
The Discussion section ('Research misconduct entails other financial costs'; page not provided) says misconduct can damage institutional and lab members’ reputations and might affect future funding. It does not link that damage to faculty recruitment or philanthropy, and its analysis concerns retractions due to misconduct rather than retractions for any reason. (LLM, conf=0.85)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredStern and colleagues calculated that each retracted article funded by the NIH accounted for a mean of $392,582 ± $423,256.
“Stern and colleagues discussed the general financial costs of retracted articles that were funded by the NIH and calculated that each retracted articles accounted for a mean of $392,582 ± $423,256 [16].”
From Genetic Insights into the Economic Toll of Cell Line Misidentification: A Comprehensive Review (2026) · cites this paper as [16]
Each retracted article results in an estimated financial loss of $392,582.
“by one estimate $392 , 582 of financial loss for each retracted article [46].”
From BioFors: A Large Biomedical Image Forensics Dataset (2021) · cites this paper as [46]
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Sevryugina, Y. V., & Jimenez, R. (2023) · ACS Omega · doi:10.1021/acsomega.3c03689 · Cited by 13 · see citing works
Panahi, S., & Soleimanpour, S. (2021) · Accountability in Research · doi:10.1080/08989621.2021.1990049 · Cited by 12 · see citing works
A epidemia de más condutas na ciência: o fracasso do tratamento moralizador
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Publication pressure and scientific misconduct: why we need more open governance
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Why do some retracted articles continue to get cited?
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BioFors: A Large Biomedical Image Forensics Dataset
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“tractions [5] and by one estimate $392, 582 of financial loss for each retracted article [46].”
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Oversight: Community vulnerabilities in the blind spot of research ethics
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Redrawing the frontiers in the age of post-publication review
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The Legal Consequences of Research Misconduct: False Investigators and Grant Proposals
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Research integrity guidelines and safeguards in Brazil
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La Oficina de Integridad Científica en España. Una tarea pendiente
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Wang, P., & Su, J. (2022) · Journal of Information Science · doi:10.1177/01655515221074329 · Cited by 8 · see citing works
Article retraction rates in selected MeSH term categories in PubMed published between 2010 and 2020
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Scientific Misconduct: Falsification, Fabrication, and Misappropriation of Credit
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Retractions in academic publishing: insights from highly ranked global universities
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Reckoning with Retractions in Research Funding Reviews: The Case of China
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The Impact of False Investigators on Grant Funding
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A Narrative on The Fabrication of Results in Science
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Off-Label Use vs Off-Label Marketing
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Self-citationCHIEN, P. F. W., Elsuity, M. A., Rashwan, M., Núñez‐Núñez, M., Khan, K. S., Zamora, J., Bueno‐Cavanillas, A., & Fawzy, M. M. (2024) · International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics · doi:10.1002/ijgo.15488 · Cited by 7 · see citing works
Ética en la publicación científica biomédica. Revisión de las publicaciones retractadas en España
Cuenca, G. M., Oliván, J. A. S., & Avilés, R. A. (2019) · El Profesional de la Informacion · doi:10.3145/epi.2019.mar.22 · Cited by 7 · see citing works
Using Statistics from Binary Variables to Detect Data Anomalies, Even Possibly Fraudulent Research
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- Authors
- Stern, A. M., Casadevall, A., Steen, R. G., & Fang, F. C.
- Affiliations
- University of Pennsylvania (US)
- Albert Einstein College of Medicine (US)
- MediCC!, Medical Communications Consultants, LLC, Chapel Hill, United States
- University of Washington (US)
- Corresponding author
- Fang, Ferric C
- Venue
- eLife
- Publisher
- eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
- Published
- 2014-08-14
- Volume
- 3
- Pages
- e02956-e02956
- ISSN
- 2050-084X (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC4132287
- OpenAlex
- W1999131703
- Cited by
- 189
- References
- 33
- Citations by year
- 2026: 17 · 2025: 14 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 19 · 2022: 16 · 2021: 21 · 2020: 16 · 2019: 19 · 2018: 11 · 2017: 8 · 2016: 14 · 2015: 14 · 2014: 4
- FWCI
- 37.24
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- eLife (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Academic integrity and plagiarism
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Academic Publishing and Open Access
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Keywords
- research misconduct, retracted article, financial costs, research funding, Office of Research Integrity, publication output, career outcomes, NIH funding, research integrity
- MeSH terms
- Humans, Retraction of Publication as Topic, United States, Scientific Misconduct, Databases, Factual, United States Office of Research Integrity, Biomedical Research
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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