Category: RW announcements

Please join us in welcoming two new Retraction Watch staff members: Managing editor Kate Travis, and reporter Avery Orrall.

Kate comes to us with a long and impressive resume. She has served as digital director at Science News, an editor for Science’s careers website, Science Careers, and news editor of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. She contributed a chapter to A Tactical Guide to Science Journalism, is the coordinator of the National Association of Science Writers’ Science in Society Journalism Awards, and serves as the part-time managing editor of Connector, an online library of resources on science writing produced by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. Reach her at [email protected]. 

Avery’s name will be familiar to readers, as she was one of our two summer interns last year and has since been our newsletter editor. She is a recent graduate of New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program, and has also interned at JAMA Medical News. Reach her at [email protected]. 

Continue reading Meet Retraction Watch’s two new journalists

We’re thrilled to announce the creation of the Retraction Watch Sleuth in Residence Program, an opportunity for a sleuth to spend a year working with us.

Too often, sleuths work for free, often at great legal and personal risk. We want to build capacity in this space so others see the value of compensating and protecting the critical work of sleuths.

The goal of this program – funded by a generous donation from George Tidmarsh – is to offer a secure and paid position for an active sleuth with a proven track record. The Sleuth in Residence would work closely with our research team on specific projects, and with our journalism team to publish their findings. All of that work would go through rigorous review and be covered by our defamation insurance policy. 

Continue reading Introducing the Retraction Watch Sleuth in Residence Program

If 2024 felt like a whirlwind, you’re not alone. It was another busy one here at Retraction Watch, too.

Some numbers to tell that story:

• 2024 was a record traffic year for us, with 7.5 million pageviews – a 15 percent jump from the previous record, set in 2015, thanks to a scoop some longtime readers may remember. 
• Here’s our top 10 list by traffic (in a thread over at Bluesky, which we joined in November).
• The Retraction Watch Database – now part of Crossref – has just shy of 55,000 retraction entries, and counting.

A sampling of a few other key accomplishments this year:

Continue reading A look back at 2024 at Retraction Watch, and forward to 2025

Update, 12/19/24: These roles have been filled. Thanks to all who expressed interest and applied in a very competitive pool.

Thanks to generous support from the WoodNext Foundation and ongoing support from individual donors, as well as revenue from journalism partnerships and speaking fees, Retraction Watch is hiring for two roles: managing editor and staff reporter. If you’re interested in accountability science journalism with impact that drives the conversation around scientific integrity and is frequently picked up by local, national and international news outlets, these roles are for you.

The managing editor will:

Continue reading Retraction Watch is hiring! Two journalism jobs available

We know we say this every year, but the last 12 months have been big ones for Retraction Watch as we celebrate our 14th birthday on August 3. We’ve continued breaking big stories and maintaining The Retraction Watch Database – while also taking big steps toward financial sustainability.

In September, we announced that the Database – which as of today contains more than 50,000 retractions – became completely open with its acquisition by Crossref. The move also allowed us to hire Gordon Sullivan, another staff member who works on the Database, and covers the costs of maintaining the Database 100% for at least five years.

We hope regular readers by now have noticed the site runs faster, with no downtime. That’s thanks to the volunteer efforts of Michael Dayah and Karl Lehenbauer, who over the past year or so have pitched in to help us with back-end platform and software issues. We can’t thank them enough for their ongoing support.

Some other highlights: 

Continue reading Happy 14th birthday, Retraction Watch – and what a year it was

Despite their retracted status, problematic articles that present unreliable information, critical errors, non-reproducible results, or fabricated data frequently continue to be propagated in the scholarly literature through continued citations. There are good reasons for citing retracted work, for example to critically discuss the information presented in the article, or in studies pertaining to the field of research integrity. 

However, in the majority of cases, retracted publications continue to be cited as if the retraction had not occurred. In studies of the citation of retracted publications, only between 5% and 20% of citations acknowledge the retracted status of the article or are critical of the article. A lack of awareness of the retracted status of a publication may be a significant contributing factor to the perpetuation of citing the article after the retraction event occurred. 

Previous research has found that the fact an article has been retracted is often inconsistently displayed across different resources, creating challenges for authors seeking out articles to refine their research questions, develop their approaches, or contextualize their findings. The continued citation and inclusion of retracted work without appropriate discussion or acknowledgement of its retracted status in subsequent studies, poses a direct threat to the reliability of the published literature and the overall trust in research and scholarship.

Continue reading How you can help improve the visibility of retractions: Introducing NISO’s Recommended Practice for Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CREC)

Dear Retraction Watch reader:

Earlier this week, The Retraction Watch Database surpassed 45,000 retractions. 

45,000.

That’s three times as many as you’ll find in other data sources. And in a recognition of the value of the Database, earlier this year Crossref acquired it – and made its contents freely available. The fact that the acquisition included five years of funding to cover the continued operation of the Database was critical to our sustainability. We were, in a word, overjoyed by the deal.

But the journalism side of Retraction Watch – the part that digs deep into stories about retraction and related issues, files public records requests, and occasionally faces legal threats – still needs regular sources of funding. At the moment, the salaries of our two reporter-editors – Ellie Kincaid and Fred Joelving – are funded by a combination of a generous two-year grant from the WoodNext Foundation, partnership with news outlets, and individual donations from readers like you.

In nonprofit parlance, we’ve diversified,  but we always face the risk that one or more of those streams may dry up. We have a few ways you can help.

Continue reading A new way to support Retraction Watch this Giving Tuesday

Today is a very big day for Retraction Watch and The Center For Scientific Integrity, our parent non-profit. Bear with me while I explain, starting with some history.

When Adam Marcus and I launched Retraction Watch in 2010, we envisioned it as a journalism blog that would break stories no one else was covering, and examine whether scientific correction mechanisms were robust. And for some time, that’s just what it was. Our traffic and visibility grew quite quickly, but the team didn’t. It was years before we even had an intern.

Things changed in 2014 and 2015. Three philanthropies – the MacArthur Foundation, the Arnold Foundation (now Arnold Ventures), and the Helmsley Trust – approached us with some version of “We think what you’re doing is important. How can we help?”

Continue reading The Retraction Watch Database becomes completely open – and RW becomes far more sustainable

The journal Scientific Reports removed a scientist linked to paper mill activity from its editorial board last year, but didn’t take his name off the web page until last month, after a Retraction Watch-Undark story pointed out his association. 

The former editorial board member, Masoud Afrand, is an assistant professor of engineering at the Islamic Azad University in Iran. 

In our story, Alexander Magazinov, a scientific sleuth and software engineer based in Kazakhstan, cited Afrand as an example of researchers seemingly associated with paper mills who manage to get editorial positions at reputable journals. Afrand, he said: 

Continue reading Editorial board member dropped from journal site after Retraction Watch-Undark report links him to paper mill

On paper, data scientist Gunasekaran Manogaran has had a stellar scientific career. He earned an award as a young researcher from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and landed a series of postdoctoral and visiting researcher positions at universities in the U.S, including the University of California, Davis; Gannon University in Pennsylvania; and Howard University in Washington, D.C. His h-index — a measure of a researcher’s impact and productivity — is 60, a number that by one model would mark him as “truly unique” if achieved within 20 years. He did it in fewer than 10.

Emails obtained by Undark, however, suggest some researchers have doubts about his publishing record. The correspondence includes an initial message from someone claiming to have previously worked with Manogaran. It was sent to some 40 editors of scientific journals, many owned by major scientific publishers: Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis among them.

The sender alleges that Manogaran and others run a research paper publishing scam — one that both generates revenues and artificially burnishes the scientific bona fides of individual and institutional participants. In particular, the alleged scheme targets what are known in the scientific publishing industry as “special issues” — self-contained special editions that are not part of a journal’s regular publishing schedule, typically focused on a single topic or theme.

The email, dated April 12, 2022, informs the journal editors that they may have partnered with members of this alleged scheme and urges them to take action. “If you don’t do that there would be a next group doing the same scam in name of different persons,” the email states.

Continue reading In a Tipster’s Note, a View of Science Publishing’s Achilles Heel