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.”
