Yearly distribution of articles retracted from 1980–2010.

<p>(A) Counts for total number of articles published (n = 4,268) or retracted (n = 2,961) for each year from 1980–2010 from dataset of 4,449 retracted articles. These values differ because an additional 508 articles have been retracted thus far in 2011, and many online-only retraction notices do not indicate retraction year. (B) Percentages of records retracted are based on numbers of records with “retracted publication” in the document type field of PubMed or “retracted article” in the title field of Web of Science divided by total number of records for each year.