Question

Pareto Charts. In Exercises 11 and 12 construct the Pareto chart. 1Journal Retractions In a study of retractions in biomedical journals, 436 were due to error, 201 were due to plagiarism, 888 were due to fraud, 291 were duplications of publications, and 287 had other causes (based on data from “Misconduct Accounts for the Majority of Retracted Scientific Publications,” by Fang, Steen, Casadevall, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 110, No. 3). Among such retractions, does misconduct (fraud, duplication, plagiarism) appear to be a major factor?

Short answer

The following Pareto chart is constructed for the frequencies of retractions corresponding to different reasons:

Yes, it can be said that misconduct appears to be a major factor.

Step-by-step solution

Given information

The data on the number of retractions that have occurred due to various reasons is provided. The values are computed as:

Reason	Number of Retractions
Fraud	888
Error	436
Duplications	291
Other	287
Plagiarism	201

Define Pareto chart

A Pareto chart is a type of bar chart in which the bars are sorted from the longest to the smallest.

The horizontal axis depicts the categories, while the vertical axis shows the frequencies. The length of the bars represents the frequencies for each category.

Sketch the chart

The following table shows the number of retractions sorted from the largest to the smallest.

Reason	Number of Retractions
Fraud	888
Error	436
Duplications	291
Other	287
Plagiarism	201

The steps to construct a Pareto chart are:

• Plot the values on the vertical axis starting from 0 until 900 with a gap of 100 units.
• Mark the categories on the horizontal axis as “Fraud,” “Error,” “Duplications,” “Other,” and “Plagiarism.”
• Draw bars for each category according to the number of retractions.
• Mark the points on the graphs corresponding to the given year.
• Label the vertical axis as “Number of Retractions.”

The following Pareto chart is constructed:

Interpret the results

Misconduct includes fraud, duplication, and plagiarism.

By observing the plot, it can be seen that misconduct, including “Fraud,” “Duplications,” and “Plagiarism” appears to be the major reason for retractions.