SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS exist to do one thing: provide accurate, peer-reviewed reports of new research to an interested audience. But according to a paper published in PNAS on August 4th, that lofty goal is badly compromised. Scientific fraud, its authors conclude, happens on a massive scale and is growing quickly. In fact, though the number of scientific articles doubles every 15 years or so, the number thought to be fraudulent has doubled every 1.5 years since 2010 (see chart). If nothing is done, says Luís Nunes Amaral, a physicist at Northwestern University in Chicago and the study’s senior author, “The scientific enterprise in its current form would be destroyed.”
