In the past few days, the New York Times has published an article about the recent increase in the retraction of papers from journals. The article is focused on the findings from the blog Retraction Watch. The experiences of this blog provide a guide as to what is happening with publication retractions. Some key facts are outlined below:

• The blog has charted a 20 to 25 percent increase in retractions across some 10,000 medical and science journals in the past five years
• The most common reason for retraction because of misconduct is image manipulation
• The second leading cause is plagiarizing text.
• The third leading reason is republishing — presenting the same results in two or more journals
• The fourth category is fabricated data

The full article can be found here.