Abstract
No study has so far examined retractions in primary care. Our aim was to assess the number/proportion of retracted articles in primary care journals and describe their main characteristics. For comparison, we also calculated the number/proportion of retractions for general internal medicine journals and for all PubMed articles. We selected the eighteen primary care journals with Journal Citation Reports (JCR) impact factor in 2021. We retrieved all PubMed articles published in these journals between January 2000 and December 2022 that were retracted. We calculated the proportion of retractions by dividing the number of retractions by the number of PubMed articles published in these journals during the same period. We also calculated the proportion of retractions for (i) all PubMed articles published in the 117 general internal medicine journals with a JCR impact factor > 2 in 2021 and (ii) all PubMed articles. We found seven retractions among the 52,453 PubMed articles published in the eighteen primary care journals. The proportion of retractions (= 0.013%) was about two times lower than for articles published in internal medicine journals (= 0.028%) and about four times lower than for all PubMed articles (= 0.056%). Four articles were retracted for misconduct, two for unintentional errors and one for another reason. Although it may be explained by a particularly high level of scientific rigour and integrity among primary care researchers, the low number of retractions in primary care journals raises questions about the effectiveness of retraction measures in these journals.
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All study data can be found in the article.
Change history
11 November 2023
In this article, the citation information was incorrectly given as (Failed, in press) but should have been (Sebo et al., 2023).
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Acknowledgements
I warmly thank Raffaella Gatto for her participation in the data collection.
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Since this study did not involve the collection of personal health-related data it did not require ethical review, according to current Swiss law.
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Sebo, P. Retractions in primary care journals (2000–2022). Scientometrics 128, 6739–6760 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04850-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04850-y