Construct the Pareto chart. In a study of retractions in...

Construct the Pareto chart. 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?

Construct the Pareto chart.
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?

Key Concepts

Pareto Chart

A Pareto Chart is a specialized bar graph that displays the frequencies or impacts of different factors in descending order, combined with a cumulative line graph that shows their aggregated percentages. It helps identify the most significant causes in a dataset, making it easier to focus on issues that have the greatest effect.

Frequency Distribution and Data Sorting

Organizing data into a frequency distribution involves counting how often each category occurs and then arranging these categories in descending order. This step is crucial when constructing a Pareto Chart, as it ensures that the most impactful issues are highlighted first.

Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule)

The Pareto Principle is the idea that roughly 80% of outcomes result from 20% of causes. When applied to analysis and quality control, it helps prioritize the factors that contribute most significantly to a problem, directing attention to the areas where improvements will have the greatest impact.

Cumulative Percentage

In a Pareto Chart, the cumulative percentage is calculated by adding together the contributions of each sorted category progressively. This running total helps visualize how much of the overall impact is accounted for by the top factors, thereby identifying the tipping point where a few causes explain the majority of the effect.

Transcript

00:01 Okay, so in this problem we look at a pareto chart for retraction, causes of retraction in a scientific paper.

00:14 So a pareto chart is basically a bar chart except that the frequency are represented in descending order with the highest frequency on the left.

00:29 So let's get started.

00:30 I'm going to use a black.

00:32 Blue for my bars and it might not be the most beautiful drawings but i'm going to do my best to give you a sense of how to do it and you should use a ruler but for sake of time i'm not going to use a ruler in this video so what's the most frequent cause of retraction in this scientific paper it's fraud so we're going to name this could take this we're going to name our axis starting with fraud and we have 888 cases of fraud so 888 is around here and it goes up to here so this is going to be our first our first bar you can fill it you don't have to i don't really i don't think there's a function in the software to just automatically fill so i'm just going to do a rough filling.

01:40 You don't have to.

01:42 So feel free not to do it.

01:45 So here we have fraud.

01:47 The second cause of retraction is errors.

01:53 So a good cause of error is, i don't know what's a good cause of error, but i know the frequency is 436.

02:01 So it should be around here and it goes there.

02:08 And then we go down like this.

02:11 And we label, of course, with error.

02:15 And we do a kind of a six -year -old version of what would be adequate to fill our bar.

02:23 So here we have it with errors.

02:26 After that, we have duplications with 291 duplications.

02:33 So 291 is kind of close to 300.