Nine and a half years ago, Adam Marcus and I had an idea: A blog about retractions. Apparently, we needed to convince ourselves that it was a good idea. Otherwise, why would our first post, on Aug. 3, 2010, be titled “Why write a blog about retractions?”
That was post #1. And this, dear reader, is post #5,000. Yes, 5,000.
Adam and I haven’t written every one of those posts. Our first intern — and then staff writer — Cat Ferguson wrote more than 200, as did Dalmeet Singh Chawla and Victoria Stern, two other staff writers. Staff writer Shannon Palus wrote nearly 400. Our editor for several years, Alison McCook, wrote more than 600.
Adam has written more than 1,000, and I’ve written more than 1,800, including more than 300 Weekend Reads, every Saturday since late 2013. (With the exception of about two years when we had generous grant support to fund partial salaries for the two of us, we have been volunteers for most of Retraction Watch’s existence, which we’re just fine with.)
Two of our posts have broken 100,000 pageviews, and they couldn’t be more different. One was when we broke the story of a Science retraction involving a study of views of same-sex marriage, and the other was when we wondered aloud about Elsevier’s withdrawal policy.
Along the way, we’ve — well, more precisely our researcher, Alison Abritis — built the world’s most comprehensive database of retractions, now being used by Zotero to flag retracted papers, and by dozens of groups of researchers to study retractions and related issues. As of this writing, it contains just shy of 21,000 retractions
But as much as we enjoy a trip down memory lane, we’re here on far more important — and exciting — business.
In honor of our 5,000th post, a generous donor has offered to match up to $5,000 in individual donations. We’ve explained elsewhere why such support is so critical to our future, so please consider contributing a tax-deductible donation by PayPal here, Crowdrise here, or by check made out to The Center For Scientific Integrity, 121 W. 36th St., Suite 209, New York, NY 10018.
Thank you in advance — and see you around the blog.
This thread is prob better under this article.
Great work Ivan, Adam, Cat Ferguson, Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Victoria Stern, Shannon Palus and Alison McCook!
How about a “where are they now” page?
5000 retractions – what has happened to these researchers? Are some retractions ok? Are some not? What does the average career look like after 1 or more retractions? Maybe you’ve already written an article on this? Can you please post this here?
Ruthie