We haven’t covered that many retractions in economics, and a 2012 paper found very few such retractions. Now, a new study based on a survey of economists tries to get a handle on how often economists commit scientific misconduct.
Here’s the abstract of “Scientific misbehavior in economics,” which appeared in Research Policy: Continue reading How often do economists commit misconduct?
One of the complaints we often hear about the self-correcting nature of science is that authors and editors seem very reluctant to retract papers with obvious fatal flaws. Indeed, it seems fairly clear that the number of papers retracted is smaller than the number of those that should be.
To try to get a sense of how errors are corrected in the literature, Arturo Casadevall, Grant Steen, and Ferric Fang, whose work on retractions will be familiar to our readers, in a new paper in the FASEB Journal, look at the sources of error in papers retracted for reasons other than misconduct.
Here’s the abstract (emphasis ours): Continue reading “Barriers to retraction may impede correction of the literature:” New study
One of the questions we often get — but are careful to answer with some version of “we don’t know because we don’t have a denominator” — is how retraction rates vary by scientific field and country. We’ve noticed that the reasons for retraction seem to vary among countries, but didn’t really have the data. A new paper in the Journal of the Medical Library Association by Kathleen Amos takes a good step toward figuring the country part out.
Amos looked at PubMed-indexed retractions from 2008 to 2012. Here’s what she found: Continue reading Which countries have the most retractions, for which reasons?
The title of this post is the title of a new commentary in Administrative Science Quarterly by Gerald Davis of the University of Michigan. Its abstract:
Continue reading “Why Do We Still Have Journals?”
Another busy week at Retraction Watch, which kicked off with our announcement that we’re hiring a paid intern. Here’s what was happening elsewhere around the web: Continue reading Weekend reads: Self-plagiarism and moral panic; sexism in science; peer review under scrutiny
Another very busy week at Retraction Watch. There were a lot of gems elsewhere. Here’s a sampling: Continue reading Weekend reads: How to rescue science, what “censorship” really means, worst paper of the year?
We’ve only covered one retraction from Nigeria. But as we’ve often noted, retraction rates don’t necessarily correlate with rates of problematic research, so the low number doesn’t really answer the question in this post’s title.
Lucky for us, a group of authors have started publishing surveys of Nigerian scientists on the subject. In a new such survey published in BMC Medical Ethics, Patrick I. Okonta and Theresa Rossouw asked 150 researchers to fill out a questionnaire during a scientific conference in 2010. Most of them — 133 — complied. Their findings? Continue reading How common is scientific misconduct in Nigeria?
Another super-busy week at Retraction Watch. Here’s what was happening in around the web in scientific publishing, misconduct, and related issues: Continue reading Weekend reads: Problems with a Science paper, how to cite properly (and improperly)
Another busy week at Retraction Watch. Here’s what was happening elsewhere on the web in scientific publishing and related issues: Continue reading Weekend reads: Former ORI director speaks out; Is peer review broken?
As Retraction Watch readers will likely recall, Paul Brookes ran Science-Fraud.org anonymously until early 2013, when he was outed and faced legal threats that forced him to shut down the site. There are a lot of lessons to be drawn from the experience, some of which Brookes discussed with Science last month.
Today, PeerJ published Brookes’ analysis of the response to critiques on Science-Fraud.org. It’s a compelling examination that suggests public scrutiny of the kind found on the site — often harsh, but always based solidly on evidence — is linked to more corrections and retractions in the literature.
Brookes looked at
497 papers for which data integrity had been questioned either in public or in private. As such, the papers were divided into two sub-sets: a public set of 274 papers discussed online, and the remainder a private set of 223 papers not publicized.
His results?
Continue reading Does publicly questioning papers lead to more corrections and retractions?