retraction

A tenfold increase in retractions around the turn of the millennium prompted action and study, including the project by Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, founders of Retraction Watch, to list and study retractions. Overall, improved vigilance has slowed the trend, but key problems remain, including: A disturbingly large portion of papers—about 2%—contain “problematic” scientific images that experts readily identified as deliberately manipulated, according to a study of 20,000 papers published in mBio in 2016 by Elisabeth Bik of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and colleagues. What’s more, our analysis showed that most of the 12,000 journals recorded in Clarivate’s widely used Web of Science database of scientific articles have not reported a single retraction since 2003. Jeffrey Brainard, Jia Read More ›

That seems counterintuitive, but consider: Retractions can be a way of sweeping misconduct under the rug, when a thorough investigation is really what is needed. The retracted paper is co-authored by researchers who used to collaborate with Yoshihiro Sato, a now-deceased bone researcher who has accrued dozens of retractions. But investigation tends to stop with the retraction, which mean that the problems may continue. In a recently published paper, Grey and his team reported that after they contacted a dozen journals that had published nearly two dozen clinical trials co-authored by Sato that had been flagged as potentially problematic, they didn’t receive a single useful response. (You can read more about our thoughts on how journals shy away from discussing Read More ›