Abstract
Although retraction is widely perceived as stigmatic in the scientific community, little is known about how retraction stigma is communicated via retraction notices. Drawing on a dataset of 1,000 retraction notices, this study investigated what communication strategies were employed in retraction notices to construct and manage retraction stigma and whether retraction notices penned by journal authorities and authors of retracted publications differed in the use of those strategies. A content analysis of the retraction notices identified three types of retraction stigma construction strategy (i.e., creating marks, assigning responsibility, and exposing perils) and four types of retraction stigma management strategy (i.e., concealing stigma visibility, refraining from labelling, manipulating responsibility assignment, and offering correction and remediation). Authorship-based differences were found in the deployment of all seven types of stigma construction and management strategy and 17 individual strategies. The use of two types of construction strategy were significantly associated with the use of three types of management strategy. These findings revealed retraction notices as capable of both stigmatizing and destigmatizing. Thus, retraction notices constitute a discourse genre that is imbued with communicative tensions rooted in the diverse functions that they can serve.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data Availability
The full set of retraction notices analyzed in this study is available from the corresponding author upon request.
References
Baskin, P. K., Mink, J. W., & Gross, R. A. (2017). Correcting honest pervasive errors in the scientific literature: Retractions without stigma. Neurology, 89(1), 11–13. https://doi.org/10.1212/WNL.0000000000004106
Benoit, W. L. (2015). Accounts, excuses, and apologies: Image repair theory and research (2nd ed.). State University of New York Press.
Committee on Publication Ethics Council (2019). COPE guidelines: Retraction guidelines. Retrieved March 1, 2022 from https://publicationethics.org/retraction-guidelines
Coons, S. (2015). Duke settles lawsuit with cancer patients over research misconduct. Research Practitioner, 16(3), 61.
Enserink, M. (2017). How to avoid the stigma of a retracted paper? Don’t call it a retraction. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aan6937
Foo, J. Y. A., & Tan, X. J. A. (2014). Analysis and implications of retraction period and coauthorship of fraudulent publications. Accountability in Research, 21(3), 198–210. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2013.848799
Glass, D. J., & Flier, J. S. (2017). Dealing with consequences of irreproducibility and modifying the published literature: Retractions versus revisions. Cell Metabolism, 26(5), 695–696. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2017.10.010
Hadjiargyrou, M. (2015). Scientific misconduct: How best to punish those who consciously violate our profession’s integrity?Journal of Information Ethics, 24(2).
Hall, J., & Martin, B. R. (2019). Towards a taxonomy of research misconduct: The case of business school research. Research Policy, 48(2), 414–427. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2018.03.006
Hesselmann, F., Graf, V., Schmidt, M., & Reinhart, M. (2017). The visibility of scientific misconduct: A review of the literature on retracted journal articles. Current Sociology, 65(6), 814–845. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392116663807
Hosseini, M., Hilhorst, M., de Beaufort, I., & Fanelli, D. (2018). Doing the right thing: A qualitative investigation of retractions due to unintentional error. Science and Engineering Ethics, 24(1), 189–206. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-017-9894-2
Hu, G., & Xu, S. B. (2020). Agency and responsibility: A linguistic analysis of culpable acts in retraction notices. Lingua, 247, 102954. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2020.102954
Keränen, L. (2006). Assessing the seriousness of research misconduct: Considerations for sanction assignment. Accountability in Research, 13(2), 179–205. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989620500440261
Kintisch, E. (2005). Scientific misconduct. Researcher faces prison for fraud in NIH grant applications and papers. Science, 307(5717), 1851. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.307.5717.1851a
Marcus, A., & Oransky, I. (2017). Is there a retraction problem? And, if so, what can we do about it? In K. H. Jamieson, D. Kahan, & G. Scambler (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of the science of science communication (pp. 119–126). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780190497620.013.13
Meisenbach, R. J. (2010). Stigma management communication: A theory and agenda for applied research on how individuals manage moments of stigmatized identity. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 38(3), 268–292. https://doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2010.490841
Redman, B., & Caplan, A. (2015). No one likes a snitch. Science and Engineering Ethics, 21(4), 813–819. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-014-9570-8
Redman, B. K., & Caplan, A. L. (2005a). Off with their heads: The need to criminalize some forms of scientific misconduct. Journal of Law Medicine & Ethics, 33(2), 345–348. https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1748-720X.2005.TB00498.X
Redman, B. K., & Caplan, A. L. (2005b). 6/1/2005). Off with their heads: the need to criminalize some forms of scientific misconduct. Journal of Law Medicine & Ethics, 33(2), 345–348. https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1748-720X.2005.TB00498.X
Retraction Watch. (n.d.). The Retraction Watch Leaderboard. https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-leaderboard/
Smart, P. (2018). A sting in the tail? Learned Publishing, 31(4), 331–333. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1202
Smith, R. (2013, December 9). Should scientific fraud be a criminal offence? thebmjopinion. https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2013/12/09/richard-smith-should-scientific-fraud-be-a-criminal-offence/
Smith, R. A. (2007). Language of the lost: An explication of stigma communication. Communication Theory, 17(4), 462–485. https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1468-2885.2007.00307.X
Smith, R. A., Zhu, X., & Quesnell, M. (2016). Stigma and health/risk communication. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. https://doi.org/10.1093/ACREFORE/9780190228613.013.96
Sovacool, B. K. (2005). Using criminalization and due process to reduce scientific misconduct. The American Journal of Bioethics, 5(5), W1–W7. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265160500313242
Teixeira da Silva, J. A., & Al-Khatib, A. (2019). Ending the retraction stigma: Encouraging the reporting of errors in the biomedical record. Research Ethics, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1177/1747016118802970
Teixeira da Silva, J. A., & Vuong, Q. H. (2021). Fortification of retraction notices to improve their transparency and usefulness. Learned Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1409
van Leeuwen, T. N., & Luwel, M. (2014). September 3–5). An in-depth analysis of papers retracted in the Web of Science. Context Counts: Pathways to Master Big and Little Data, Leiden, the Netherlands.
Vuong, Q. H. (2018). The (ir)rational consideration of the cost of science in transition economies. Nature Human Behaviour, 2(1), 5–5. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0281-4
Vuong, Q. H. (2019). The limitations of retraction notices and the heroic acts of authors who correct the scholarly record: An analysis of retractions of papers published from 1975 to 2019. Learned Publishing, 33(3), 119–130. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1282
Vuong, Q. H. (2020). Reform retractions to make them more transparent. Nature, 582(7811), 149. https://doi.org/10.1038/D41586-020-01694-X
Wager, E., Barbour, V., Yentis, S., & Kleinert, S. (2009). Retraction guidelines. Retrieved April 1, 2020 from https://publicationethics.org/newsevents/cope%E2%80%99s-retraction-guidelines
Williams, P., & Wager, E. (2013). Exploring why and how journal editors retract articles: Findings from a qualitative study. Science and Engineering Ethics, 19(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-011-9292-0
Xu, S. B., & Hu, G. (2018). Retraction notices: Who authored them? Publications, 6(1), https://doi.org/10.3390/publications6010002
Xu, S. B., & Hu, G. (2021). Retraction notices as a high-stakes academic genre: A move analysis. In K. L. Lin, I. N. Mwinlaaru, & D. Tay (Eds.), Approaches to specialized genres (pp. 101–120). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429053351
Xu, S. B., & Hu, G. (2022a). A cross-disciplinary and severity-based study of author-related reasons for retraction. Accountability in Research. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2021.1952870
Xu, S. B., & Hu, G. (2022b). Non-author entities accountable for retractions: A diachronic and cross-disciplinary exploration of reasons for retraction. Learned Publishing, n/a (n/a).https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1445
Xu, S. B., & Hu, G. (2022c). Retraction stigma and its communication via retraction notices. Minerva. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-022-09465-w
Yeo-Teh, N. S. L., & Tang, B. L. (2022). A research misconduct severity matrix that could serve to harmonize adjudication of findings. Accountability in Research, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2021.1917398
Zhang, M., & Grieneisen, M. L. (2013). The impact of misconduct on the published medical and non-medical literature, and the news media. Scientometrics, 96(2), 573–587. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0920-5
Funding
No funding was received to assist with the preparation of this manuscript.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.
Informed consent
As this study drew on publicly avaiable data (i.e., published retraction notices) and did not involve participants, no informed consent was required.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Xu, S.(., Hu, G. Construction and management of retraction stigma in retraction notices: an authorship-based investigation. Curr Psychol 43, 16030–16043 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03738-z
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03738-z