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If Retraction Watch was actually a business, as opposed — for the moment, anyway — to a labor of love for two guys with day jobs, 2011 would have been a very good year for business.

It was a year that will probably see close to 400 retractions, including a number of high-profile ones, once the dust settles. Those high numbers caught the attention of a lot of major media outlets, from Nature to NPR to the Wall Street Journal. Science publications, including LiveScience and The Scientist, have done their own end-of-year retraction lists.

It was also a good year for us at Retraction Watch. Many news outlets featured us in their coverage, either picking up stories we’d broken or asking us for comment on big-picture issues. Three national NPR programs — Science Friday, On the Media, and All Things Considered — had us on air. We launched a column in LabTimes, and Nature asked us to write a year-end commentary. We even earned a Wikipedia entry. Continue reading The Year of the Retraction: A look back at 2011

If there’s one consistent lesson of covering retractions, it’s that science doesn’t stop when researchers publish a paper. But what also seems true is that once a paper is published, lots of people — authors and editors, in particular — are often reluctant to say just what’s happened next, particularly if it casts the study or the journal in a negative light.

Some of this is understandable, given the weight given papers by tenure committees and granting agencies. Still, Retraction Watch readers will not be surprised to know we’d like that to change, so when Nature asked us to contribute an end-of-the-year commentary, we decided to focus on post-publication peer review. In our piece, which appears this week, titled “The paper is not sacred,” we argue: Continue reading Stop fetishizing the scientific paper: Our invited Comment in Nature