Noticed: Sleuths are starting to get credit for retractions

Pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis has flagged thousands of papers over the years, so they rarely see something new. But an email from Frontiers about an upcoming retraction on a paper Francis originally flagged offered just that: The option to be acknowledged in the retraction notice.

After years of publishers not routinely – or even often – naming sleuths despite many asking for their often unpaid and risky work to be acknowledged, the trend of acknowledging who identified issues in papers may be gaining momentum. Frontiers is one of several publishers developing such policies, and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) plans to release new guidelines in August that would recommend this practice. 

Frontiers began offering acknowledgements last year, a spokesperson for the company told Retraction Watch. “Once investigations are complete, the third party is informed of the outcome and, if a retraction is to be published, offered the option to be recognized in the notice with a standardized statement,” they said.

In the email Francis received, they were offered the option to be thanked by name, or as “the concerned reader.” (Francis chose the latter.)

A retraction published in March gave a shout-out to another sleuth familiar to our readers: “Frontiers would like to thank Alexander Magazinov for contacting the journal regarding the published article.”

While some retractions now contain this standardized statement, the publisher uses it only when the investigation originated from a third party raising concerns, the spokesperson told us.

Other publishers plan to follow suit. Both Springer Nature and Wiley representatives told us they are working on policies to acknowledge third parties across their journals. 

“There are a number of important areas that we believe need careful consideration,” Tim Kersjes, head of research integrity, resolutions, for Springer Nature told us, “including potential legal risk to those who are named in notices, permanence of records of investigations, thresholds for inclusion, an effective process for opting in or out of recognition, and a process for launching it across over three thousand journals.”

For Wiley journals, “if the concern was shared with us in confidence, we will only include the source’s name if they have provided permission, and if the journal’s editor also agrees,” a spokesperson told us. As this process varies by journal, “we are working toward a more standard approach across our portfolio.”

We asked Francis, as well as sleuths Alexander Magazinov, David Bimler, and Dorothy Bishop, for their thoughts on new policies to name third parties in retraction notices. All four favored this type of policy because it increases transparency into the process. 

“Ideally publishers should link to a PubPeer thread and contributors’ pseudonyms, if they were notified through public channels,” said Bimler, a retired perceptual psychologist from Massey University in New Zealand.

He and the others noted that giving credit should not come at the expense of offering anonymity. “It is extremely important not to disclose the third party’s name if they don’t explicitly consent to that,” said Magazinov, a software engineer in Kazakhstan. 

The sleuths emphasized that getting credit was secondary to the main goal, “decontamination of the scientific literature,” as Magazinov put it.

“It might also help forge a more positive relationship between sleuths and publishers,” said Bishop, an emeritus professor of developmental neuropsychology at the University of Oxford. These relationships have been strained in the past, partially due to policies explicitly denying sleuths credit. Thomas Tischler, a senior editor at Springer Nature, told sleuths last year that “by policy, we do not mention how the case came to us and do not acknowledge any external parties.”

The Frontiers spokesperson said the initiative “has been positively received by third parties and the broader publishing community.” 

COPE Chair Nancy Chescheir told a committee of the National Academy of Sciences in June her group would be revising its guidelines for retractions later this summer. “If concerns about the article are raised by a third party, their name could be included in the retraction notice, if relevant, with permission,” she said at the time. 

Holden Thorp, Editor-in-Chief of the Science family of journals, told the same committee that Science would prefer to acknowledge sleuths, but institutions and authors “are often very hostile to the idea of including the sleuths.” He said he was happy to hear about the new policy because “if we can fall back on a COPE guideline that allows us to put that in there, we’ll definitely start doing it.”

Sleuths aren’t the only ones receiving credit under the new guidelines. “If concerns were raised by an institutional investigation, this information should be included,” Chescheir told the National Academies committee. 

A COPE spokesperson said the updated retraction guideline is being finalized and requires trustee approval, but they expect it to launch in August. 

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