Abstract
Retractions are rare in science, but there is growing concern about the impact retracted papers have. We present data on the retractions in the journal Science, between 1983 and 2017. Each year, approximately 2.6 papers are retracted; that is about 0.34% of the papers published in the journal. 30% of the retracted papers are retracted within 1 year of publication. Some papers are retracted almost 12 years after publication. 51% of the retracted papers are retracted due to honest mistakes. Smaller research teams of 2–4 scientists are responsible for a disproportionately larger share of the retracted papers especially when it comes to retractions due to honest mistakes. In 60% of the cases all authors sign the retraction notice.
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Notes
One high profile case from the USA suggests that the propensity to cheat in scientific research may originate quite early in one’s training. In the case of John R. Darsee, a research fellow at Harvard who was caught fabricating data, an inquiry traced his irresponsible behavior back to his undergraduate days at Notre Dame. See Culliton (1983).
David Hull argues that, compared to politicians, scientists seem to be far less inclined to act dishonestly. Hull attributes this to the fact that the interests of individual scientists line up with the interests of science, the institution (Hull 2001).
In one case, a single article was retracted in two notices. In this particular case, 2 months after the initial retraction a more elaborate retraction was issued. In the data we report below, we only count this retracted paper once, and we focus on the initial retraction.
The most recent retraction notice published in Science prior to 1983 was published in 1968.
We have included one retracted piece in our study that is neither a Research Article nor a Report, but rather a Review Article.
Our findings deviate somewhat from findings reported in an earlier study of articles in PubMed. In that study, 9% of the retracted articles were single authored, and 46% were authored by teams of two to four scientists. The remaining 45% were authored by teams of five or more scientists (see Wager and Williams 2011, 568–569). It is noteworthy that PubMed is an archive of the scholarly literature in biomedicine and the life sciences only.
K. Brad Wray describes how some very large research teams have internal peer review processes in place (Wray 2018).
Five of the 14 editorial retractions were not titled as such in Science, though it was the editors of Science who issued the retractions. Perhaps a lower level of warning is the “Editorial expression of concern.” An example is Berg (2017).
Sometimes when a retraction notice retracts more than one article, the various retracted articles will not have all the same authors. For example, a notice may announce the retraction of two articles, one authored by authors A, B and C, and the other authored by A, B, D, and E. The retraction may then be authored by A, B, C, D and E. C, D, and E are then retracting a paper that they did not co-author together with a paper they did co-author.
Judith Bar-Ilan and Gali Halevi have studied the citations of 15 articles after they were retracted. They take into account the nature of both the retractions and the citations and still find a large majority of the post-retraction citations to be problematic (Bar-Ilan and Halevi 2017).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Kristian Hvidtfelt Nielsen for feedback on an earlier draft. We would also like to thank our audience in Gent, when KBW presented an earlier version of the paper at the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice conference, in July 2018. We also thank the referees for Scientometrics for their critical feedback. Finally, we thank Aarhus Universitets Forskningsfond (AUFF) for a Starting Grant awarded to KBW. This grant, AUFF-E-2017-FLS-7-3, supports LEA.
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Wray, K.B., Andersen, L.E. Retractions in Science. Scientometrics 117, 2009–2019 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2922-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2922-4