Scientific publications of affiliated authors in Italy retracted due to fraud. Review and analysis

The purpose of this study is to review the publications retracted due to fraud written by authors with affiliation in Italy in the period 2000-2020. For the identification of retracted publications, Retraction Watch Database has been used and Web of Science and Pubmed databases have been used for their verification and review. A total of 112 retractions were obtained due to fraud related the criteria defined in the methodology. The results obtained establish that the main cause of retraction due to scientific misconduct has been plagiarism, which represents 77.68% of the retractions reviewed. 20.54% of retractions are associated with data falsification/fabrication and 1.79% with both causes. There is an average of 5.6 articles retracted per year in the period analyzed. The most frequent type of retracted works are research articles in the area of Life Sciences and Biomedicine. It is noteworthy that 37% of the articles continue to be cited after their retraction.