Figure 6: Articles retracted as a function of year of publication, shown with model predictions of the number of papers likely to be retracted. These single-retraction authors are significantly more likely to have a paper retracted for misconduct rather than fraud. Overall, the authors suggest the following factors have contributed to the increase in retraction rates:. I think the greater question is why this article is based on a study from ? Surely there is more current research.
These investigations are often slow and inconclusive, so journals often substitute safer, blander terms such as error, loss of data or replication failure. A publication-integrity checklist published earlier this year might help: it is a series of questions such as whether a study could plausibly be done as described, and could be used to pinpoint problems without requiring a formal declaration of misconduct A. Grey et al. Nature , —; Scientists reveal what they learnt from their biggest mistakes.
Here, the third component of the retraction notice comes in. This makes clear that editors and authors can provide different reasons for the retraction, rather than having to agree on the final wording. The fourth component stresses the role of the users of research in safeguarding the literature, and gives credit for this process.
The people who flagged problems can stay unidentified if they wish, and editors or institutions should explain what they did to investigate. I think reform in retraction processing would promote best practice.
Four-component notices would offer publishing norms, especially for emerging economies. And transparency could allow researchers and editors everywhere to learn about mistakes and misconduct that warrant retractions, as well as the grey areas of disagreement. Furthermore, journals should mandate that every paper carry a section about its limitations that is free to read, like an abstract. Retractions expose flaws and possibly misconduct in research, but also show that the error-detection mechanism is working well.
With this understanding, we must rehabilitate the term. Retractions are not intrinsically bad: they are a practical way to correct for human fallibility and strengthen the scientific enterprise. Citations 6. Peer-reviewed articles, published by scholarly journals, currently form the cornerstone of the modern scholarly publication system and guarantee the dissemination of research findings through the worldwide, ever-increasing community of researchers. It is the duty of every scholar to add knowledge to this record by publishing but also to ensure the integrity of the existing works by critically assessing them: before publication, acting as a reviewer or editor, and post-publication, by building upon existing works, improving them, and checking their reproducibility.
Discussion of published papers regularly takes place on Twitter and through blog posts and preprints, as well as in structured discussions: comments on the webpage on published papers e. Critique of published articles is a necessary and healthy part of the advancement of science. In such cases, the paper may be corrected or retracted, i. COPE, the Committee on Publication Ethics, publishes a series of guidelines policies and practices that are considered the industry standard in publishing ethics.
The areas covered include the handling of allegations of misconduct, complaints and appeals, data issues and reproducibility, and standards of authorship, as well as post-publication corrections and the retraction of papers.
COPE guidelines give clear insights into the difference in nature between corrections and retractions. Despite the healthy role of retractions in preserving the scientific record, and while erroneous data can be the result of a good faith mistake, there is definitely a stigma associated with the retraction of a paper. Thus, none of the actors involved have any direct incentive to retract a paper.
In this context, and while the number of retractions is rising, 8,9 there is relatively little information available about retractions and retracted papers, beyond the retraction notices infrequently published by journals. There is no central repository or authoritative database that can be easily queried—although the Retraction Watch website, which covers the topic of retractions and publication ethics in general, has been collating such a database.
This article looks at the statistics of retractions, their distribution per country, and the occurrence of multiple retractions. I also provide a classification of the reasons behind the retractions and the distribution of their occurrence. How Many Papers Are Retracted? This is a very small number compared to a total of 1,, papers published in those fields in the same two years, with on average 3 papers retracted for 10, papers published.
The geographic distribution of the retracted papers is given in Figure 1. The distribution generally reflects the number of papers published by each country. We see that The same is true of the United States, with High Resolution Image. Indian affiliations account for But the country featuring the largest rate of retraction is Iran, which is involved in The ratio of retracted papers from Iran is 4.
I note that while a small number of authors contribute heavily to those numbers, they do not—in themselves—appear to account entirely for the higher rate.
Analysis over a larger time period would be necessary to confirm these trends. How long after their original publication are papers retracted? The distribution of retraction time, presented in Figure 2 , is well-spread. On the other hand, many papers take longer to retract: the median time to retraction in this data set is 24 months. But the distribution has a long tail; the tardiest retraction observed is for a paper published in June and retracted 18 years later, in February DOI: Figure 2.
Distribution of time to retraction, in months. Looking at the distribution in citations of the retracted papers Figure 3 , we see also a wide variety.
This is linked, to a large extent, with the large distribution of time to retraction. Since we look at papers retracted in and , the vast majority of citations reported were made before the retraction—it would be interesting, in future work, to look at older retractions to see if those papers are still cited by the community. The median number of citations is quite low, 4, while the average is The most cited paper in the data set was cited times in the course of 13 years DOI: Figure 3.
Distribution of number of citations of retracted papers. How Common Are Multiple Retractions? The past few years have seen the revelation of a certain number of cases of high-profile scientific misconduct, where the discovery of unethical practices by an author or research group leads to retraction of several papers. From the — retractions analyzed here, we clearly identify some cases of large-scale retractions, all of which have been reported in specialized media.
Madhuri and P. Tang and X. Ye Tsinghua University in Beijing , 19 9 for A. Thakur and R. Shin Kangwon National University in Chuncheon. These cases of large-scale retractions are well publicized, and they account for a nonnegligible fraction of the retracted papers. Why Are Papers Retracted? To see why papers are being retracted, I have classified the reasons being listed in each retraction notice see Methods for details into four main categories.
The results are shown in Figure 4 and Table 1 , and the data is available as Supporting Information —including, for each paper, the full retraction notice and my classification into categories.
We note that although nowadays publishers can now check for plagiarism with automated software tools upon submission of manuscripts, 23 that was not always the case, and some papers retracted in and were published before this software was available. We cannot determine, from the published retraction notices, what is the main motivation of authors in plagiarizing, but previous studies have pointed to possible contributing factors: lack of academic infrastructure and mentoring 24 and incentives based on the number of publications, whether in the form of cash bonuses 17 or career advancement.
Table 1. The terminology used by retraction notices—which can be written either by the publisher, the editor, or the authors—to discuss this data can be very varied. This includes cases of fabrication, invalid duplication, digital editing, etc. Finally, there were a few 8 cases where the cause of retraction is due to lack of data ownership, lack of authorization to publish the data, or disclosure of confidential or proprietary information.
In most cases, the issue is a lack of authorization to publish from one of the authors. In most cases, it is a co-author who has not been informed of the submission and publication of the paper—and quite often a senior co-author, supervisor or advisor, according to the retraction notices surveyed. Authorship disputes leading to retraction can also take the form of a missing co-author 13 cases , i. From , Lower barriers to publication of flawed articles are seen in the increase in number and proportion of retractions by authors with a single retraction.
Lower barriers to retraction are apparent in an increase in retraction for "new" offenses such as plagiarism and a decrease in the time-to-retraction of flawed work.
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