Category: studies about retractions

The consequences of retraction: Do scientists forgive and forget?

NBERHere at Retraction Watch, we are reminded every day that everybody  (including us) makes mistakes — what matters is, how you handle yourself when it happens. That’s why we created a “doing the right thing” category, to flag incidents where scientists have owned up to their errors and taken steps to correct them.

We’re not suggesting retractions have no effect on a scientist’s career — a working paper posted last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that principal investigators with retracted papers see an average drop of 10% in citations of their other papers, a phenomenon known as a citation penalty. But they face a bigger penalty if the retraction stemmed from misconduct, rather than an honest mistake.

This jibes with research we’ve seen before, which shows the scientific community can be forgiving when researchers own up to their mistakes – notably, a 2013 study that found scientists face no citation penalty if they ask to retract their own papers, rather than forcing the journal or publisher to act.

Continue reading The consequences of retraction: Do scientists forgive and forget?

Pressure to publish not to blame for misconduct, says new study

plosoneA new study suggests that much of what we think about misconduct — including the idea that it is linked to the unrelenting pressure on scientists to publish high-profile papers — is incorrect.

In a new paper out today in PLOS ONE [see update at end of post], Daniele Fanelli, Rodrigo Costas, and Vincent Larivière performed a retrospective analysis of retractions and corrections, looking at the influence of supposed risk factors, such as the “publish or perish” paradigm. The findings appeared to debunk the influence of that paradigm, among others:

Continue reading Pressure to publish not to blame for misconduct, says new study

Psychology retractions have quadrupled since 1989: study

stapel
Diederik Stapel

Marc Hauser. Dirk Smeesters. Diederik Stapel.

Psychology has been home to some of the most infamous cases of fraud in recent years, and while it’s just a few bad apples who are spoiling the bunch, the field itself has seen an overall increase in retractions, according to a new paper by Jürgen Margraf appearing in Psychologische Rundschau and titled “Zur Lage der Psychologie.”

That increase, Margraf found, is not entirely due to its most well-known fraudsters. Here’s the relevant figure:

Continue reading Psychology retractions have quadrupled since 1989: study

Are retractions more frequent in stem cell research?

sci eng ethicsThere are a number of fields that seem to punch above their weight on Retraction Watch: Anesthesiology, home to the world record holder (and runner-up), and psychology, home to Diederik Stapel and others. But the red-hot field of stem cell research is another that makes frequent appearances, last year’s STAP controversy being particularly prominent.

There’s an interesting (but unfortunately paywalled) recent paper in Science and Engineering Ethics, “The Acid Test for Biological Science: STAP Cells, Trust, and Replication,” by Cheryl Lancaster, a small part of which tries to answer that question.

Lancaster applies the same methods Fang, Steen, and Casadevall used to broadly measure the causes of retractions in all life science and biomedicine to the specific field of stem cell research: Continue reading Are retractions more frequent in stem cell research?

More evidence scientists continue to cite retracted papers

Screen Shot 2015-02-17 at 2.38.46 PMA new paper in the MDPI journal Publications reports that the only controlled study on the effect of giving COPD patients Omega-3 has been cited 52 times since being retracted. Of those, only two mentioned the retraction.

In 2005, Chest published an article that found that COPD patients who took omega-3 supplements for 2 years experienced improvements in their condition, such as better walking tests and a decrease in sputum cytokines. But when an institutional investigation found the lead author had falsified the data, the journal retracted the paper in 2008.

That’s news to many researchers in the field. Among the 50 papers that cited the research after 2008 without stating it had been retracted, 20 included “specific data” from the paper, while the other 30 “cited the reference in passing.” Articles citing the retracted study have themselves been cited 947 times total, pointing to the ripple effect this kind of unwitting mention can have throughout the literature.

Continue reading More evidence scientists continue to cite retracted papers

What do studies of retractions tell us?

jmbeThe Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education has published a special issue on scientific ethics, and it includes an invited piece from us.

In “What Studies of Retractions Tell Us,” we decided to do a literature review of the small but growing field of retraction studies. Five years ago, this would have been a very short paper, consisting of a handful of references, but we were able to find about 30 studies to include quite easily.

Here’s the abstract: Continue reading What do studies of retractions tell us?

“Research misconduct accounts for a small percentage of total funding”: Study

elifeHow much money does scientific fraud waste?

That’s an important question, with an answer that may help determine how much attention some people pay to research misconduct. But it’s one that hasn’t been rigorously addressed.

Seeking some clarity,  Andrew Stern, Arturo Casadevall, Grant Steen, and Ferric Fang looked at cases in which the Office of Research Integrity had determined there was misconduct in particular papers. In their study, published today in eLife: Continue reading “Research misconduct accounts for a small percentage of total funding”: Study

Some retractions take three years to show up on PubMed: Study

bmcresnotesRetraction Watch readers may have noticed that we often cover retractions long before they appear in PubMed, the gold standard database for the life sciences literature. (In fact, we’ve taken to leaving comments on papers in PubMed Commons about retractions that haven’t been linked to their original abstracts yet.)

This can be an issue, because so many scientists use PubMed to find relevant literature. It may even contribute to the well-documented phenomenon of researchers citing retracted papers as if they hadn’t been retracted.

Until now, no one had quantified the time lag. In a new study, Evelynne Decullier, Laure Huot, and Hervé Maisonneuve — who have published on retractions before — looked at 237 retractions published in 2008. Their findings? Continue reading Some retractions take three years to show up on PubMed: Study

How often do economists commit misconduct?

research policyWe 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?

“Barriers to retraction may impede correction of the literature:” New study

faseb june 2014One 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