In what has become an annual tradition, our friends at The Scientist asked us to round up what we thought were the biggest retractions of the last 12 months. Not surprisingly, the list is dominated by some of the 39 retractions we’ve seen of COVID-19 studies. But that’s not the whole list.
Retractions are more common than we — or anyone else — thought they were. Two decades ago, journals were retracting roughly 40 papers per year. Although we were pretty sure they needed to be doing more to police the literature, we had no idea how much more. We also assumed the number was somewhat similar in 2010, but we were off by at least an order of magnitude, depending how you count. Journals now retract about 1,500 articles annually — a nearly 40-fold increase over 2000, and a dramatic change even if you account for the roughly doubling or tripling of papers published per year — and even that’s too few.
On Aug. 3, 2010, we published our first post on Retraction Watch. Titled, “Why write a blog about retractions?”, the welcome letter to readers outlined our hopes for the new blog. Retractions, we felt then, offered “a window into the scientific process,” as well as a source of good stories for journalists. In both regards, we have not been disappointed.
Over the past few days, we’ve noticed a spike in traffic — sometimes so large that it crashes our site — to older posts about Judy Mikovits. It appears that Mikovits is once again in the news. Here’s a story from Vice that provides some context:
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In our early days, at our “office,” the former Market Diner
Nine and a half years ago, Adam Marcus and I had an idea: A blog about retractions. Apparently, we needed to convince ourselves that it was a good idea. Otherwise, why would our first post, on Aug. 3, 2010, be titled “Why write a blog about retractions?”
That was post #1. And this, dear reader, is post #5,000. Yes, 5,000.
Daniel Vasgird was a well-known figure in research integrity circles. He died in late January at the age of 74. We’re honored to present a remembrance that Michael Kalichman put together to honor Vasgird’s memory at the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE) meeting next week in Atlanta.
Just a few weeks ago, the research integrity community lost a dear friend and leader. For those who did not know Dan well, it might help to describe his particular role in creating the still evolving domain of “research ethics.”
Dan trained in social sciences, beginning with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in California at UC Riverside, followed by a move to New York, where he earned his Ph.D. in Social Psychology at Syracuse University. After completing his Ph.D., Dan accepted an NIMH post-doctoral research fellowship at Berkeley and worked in Asia as a human services educator and consultant for the federal government.
His career in research ethics began in 1988 with the New York City Department of Health. Dan both chaired the Institutional Review Board and became director of a Health Research Training Program. His career trajectory continued with City University of New York (2000-2002) where he was responsible for overseeing human research protections through 19 Institutional Research Boards, worked on developing a conflict of interest policy, and taught courses in research ethics.
In August 2020, Retraction Watch will turn 10 — a milestone we still can’t quite wrap our minds around. When we started the blog in 2010, we thought we might have enough material for a post or two a month. Little did we know that our little side gig would eventually lead to the world’s largest database of retracted papers; or that there would be so many of them (now more than 1,400 per year); or, to be honest, how little we (and others) knew about these events.
This year saw several important developments for our project. We entered into a partnership with Zotero that allows them to alert users to retractions of any papers in their personal libraries — and, we hope, helps researchers to better avoid citing retracted papers in their work. Our database now includes more than 20,000 retractions.
Not surprisingly, the year that saw our database surpass 20,000 retractions was a busy one for us. In what has become an annual tradition, our friends at The Scientist asked us to round up what we thought were the biggest retractions of the last 12 months.