If Retraction Watch were the child of Jewish parents – which happens to be the case – it would be celebrating its bar mitzvah this year. Yes, that’s right, mazel tovs are in order: Retraction Watch turns 13 today.
And as the blog becomes some version of an adult, we have plenty to celebrate. This week, we published an op-ed in Scientific American. And here are highlights of the past 12 months:
- A new $250,000 grant from the WoodNext Foundation that allowed us to hire another editor, Fred Joelving, who is already breaking stories right and left.
- The additional bandwidth got us back to partnering with other outlets. Since January, we’ve published investigations and other stories with Undark, Science, STAT, and the Flatwater Free Press (with pickup by Nebraska Public Media).
- A study published in Research Policy “found that reporting retractions on RW significantly reduced post-retraction citations of non-swiftly retracted articles in biomedical sciences.” In other words, when Retraction Watch covers a retraction, the retracted paper is less likely to be cited.
- The Retraction Watch Database surpassed 40,000 retractions, which is three times as many as PubMed and multiples of other sources, and powers scholarship as well as retraction alerts in Edifix, EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. Clarivate has begun using it to vet its Highly Cited Researchers list. The Economist used data from the Retraction Watch Database to illustrate the amount of fraud in the biomedical literature.
- We published an invited editorial in Anesthesiology, “How to Stop the Unknowing Citation of Retracted Papers.”
Our work was cited by or featured in The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Guardian, Nature, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Reuters, Science Friday, Times Higher Education, Vox, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, WIRED, and elsewhere. And it’s not just those U.S. and UK-based outlets, but also publications in Argentina, Bangladesh, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Norway, The Netherlands, Vietnam, and elsewhere.
Thank you.
We close these birthday posts the same way every year: We always need more help. So we’re asking that you please consider a donation to support our work. (Unlike most bar mitzvah gifts, these are tax-deductible!) You can make a one-time contribution by PayPal or by Square, or a monthly tax-deductible donation by Paypal. Or if you prefer to send a check, please make it out to The Center For Scientific Integrity and mail it to 121 W. 36th St., Suite 209, New York, NY 10018. Should you be in a position to donate securities, please contact [email protected] for instructions.
Thank you in advance, and thank you for your ongoing support.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].
Thank you for 13 years of outstanding work that has made a significant impact on science.
Congratulations. Keep up your very important work. No other organisation has done as much to help keep science clean.
Happy birthday and mazel tov, Retraction Watch! You have become an institution of enlightenment for science. Keep up the great work!
Great job. Just a minor suggestion. Focusing and remaining on the topic of retraction would improve consistency and the future success. Also, it would be great if the authors of retracted articles could be interviewed about the reason of retraction and how it could be prevented. Sometimes, the retraction is solely due to the carelessness and professional behaviour of editorial and it could be easily prevented.
Happy birthday, RW. And many more!!
Congrats! Keep up the good work.
Amazing! HBD! And thank you for everything you do!
Thanks for all of your efforts. I left academia because of disappointment regarding the toxic “publications-define-everything” culture, but I believe your blogs will bring the real academic culture back.
Congratulations. Your steady, factual reporting of your diggings is one factor in your ongoing success. As you rattled off some of the your accomplishments, RW is having a strong role promoting better scientific integrity.
And congratulations on your selection of interns and editors who made a mark and honed their skills at RW. For instance, Cat Ferguson, presumably the same, is an excellent investigative journalist at SFGate. Maybe a future post on where some of the interns have moved onto and their perspective s?
Mazel Tov!
Kudos to Ivan, Adam, and all the interns and other contributors over the last 13 years. Thank you for your substantial contribution to making science better (or at least, less worse).