Remember last week, when JAMA replaced an article about the impact of moving homes on kids’ mental health after discovering some errors in the analysis? We’re going to see more of these somewhat unusual notices coming out of JAMA journals in the near future – the JAMA Network journals may issue more “retract and replace” decisions for papers, in which it pulls an old version of an article and replaces it with a corrected one. But it’s not a correction — we spoke with Annette Flanagin, the Executive Managing Editor for The JAMA Network, to learn more.
Retraction Watch: We’ve spotted three “retract and replace” notices in JAMA journals, including one issued earlier this year for a highly cited paper that contained “pervasive errors,” and the one last week about the impact of moving on kids’ mental health. How do you decide whether a paper will be retracted and replaced, or just retracted?
Annette Flanagin: For articles with confirmed research misconduct (eg, fabrication, falsification), we will publish a Notice of Retraction and retract the article. However, several studies have shown that about 20% of retractions are due to some type of major error, not misconduct. And we need a mechanism to address honest pervasive error (ie, unintentional human or programmatic errors that result in the need to correct numerous data and text in the abstract, text, tables and figures, such as a coding error) without the current stigma that is associated with retraction. Thus, for articles with honest pervasive error, in which the corrections needed to address the errors result in statistically significant changes to the findings, interpretations, or conclusions and for which the methodology/science is still valid, we will consider publication of a Notice of Retraction and Replacement. In such cases, we would also publish a Letter of explanation from the authors. We hope this will allow readers/users to access and use the work (in its replaced version) – without being stopped cold by a Do Not Use Retraction notice and Retraction watermark on the article.
