Recently we have posted (and commented) a fair bit about the real and serious damage to science done by retracted papers. Institutions and publishers need to do more the process faster, more transparent and to deal with retracted papers being cited. The mass media needs to do more when they have based their reporting/comments on academic papers that are later retracted. There needs to be more serious action if a researcher has polluted the body of knowledge with a research output that is found to be shonky/the product of research misconduct. We have included links to six related items.
Reports on the preliminary results of an empirical study of post-retraction citations of biomedical research literature. Retractions of biomedical publications have a serious impact on research enterprise and public health. Retractions to correct literature and alert readers are actions by the journals based on evidence of serious flaws or errors or upon the request of the authors. The process of retraction could take a few weeks or years after publication. The purpose of this study is to investigate how retracted peer-reviewed journal articles were cited post-retraction. Post-retraction citing articles are those published two years after the retraction year. The dataset includes 961 post-retraction citing articles that cited one or more of 77 retracted articles. The 77 retracted articles were also recommended by experts in a literature recommendation database (Faculty Opinions). The findings show that a higher percentage of the continued use of the retracted articles made no mention of the retraction or invalid results in these articles. Retracted articles and their retraction notices need to be open access; entities involved in publishing and providing literature resources must practice diligence in ensuring the validity of scientific literature.
Wang, P., Mccullough, L.B., & Su, J. (2022) Continued Use of Retracted Publications: Implications for Scientific Publishing and Information Systems. iConference 2022 [8 pages] Publisher (Open Access): https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_infosciepubs/462/
