Retractions
| 8 November, 2010 | Richard P. Grant |
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Nature ran an editorial last week on what might to appear to be a retraction epidemic. There do seem to be more retractions recently, due to a number of potential reasons:
More awareness of misconduct by journals and the community, an increased ability to create and to detect unduly manipulated images, and greater willingness by journals to publish retractions must account for some of this rise. One can also speculate about the increasing difficulty for senior researchers of keeping track of the detail of what is happening in their labs.
Ivan Oransky suggests that when a paper is retracted, the journal should issue a press release, although it’s not clear whether Oransky means the journal should do this if if it doesn’t have a habit of regular press releases.
At F1000 we naturally keep an eye out for retractions, and clearly mark evaluations of such papers accordingly (see https://f1000.com/1032891 for example). These evaluations remain in our index as a matter of scientific record. But is that enough, do you think? Should we do any more?
While you ponder that, what do you think of Oransky’s suggestion, that whenever a journal issues a retraction, it sends out a press release?
Here’s the poll:
[poll id=”4″]
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Electronic edition marked with retraction is enough, this makes it clear that one should not read it any more.
Retraction appears not to be enough in all cases. The shocking case of human tissue harvesting in UK that led to the Alderhay scandal, and subsequent legislation that makes human tissue research so much harder with onerous ethical requirements. also resulted in a number of papers, some of which editors have retracted and yet people remain unaware that these papers have been retracted. Worse still, some remain unretracted (with editors aware of what has happened) and this should be made widely known. Publicity is definitely needed.
I fully agree that publicity on retractions is needed (see second comment), but I disagree that retracted papers should not be read anymore (see first comment). Such papers may still be based on interesting scientific thought and – provided the authors of the retracted papers get a chance to make clear why the paper was retracted – these papers are still helpful in pointing out new directions. Only by insight in, and not by ignorance of, retracted paper, cab the scientific process be promoted.
Most important is that the electronic paper, e.g. in pubmed and the Journal’s archive, is marked as retracted.
I voted the middle options, since it seems fair to give a retracted paper a similar amount of press exposure as the original paper.
I think retractions should be at least linked to the original papers and reasons for retracting papers should be clearly stated. Recently the retraction of number of papers written by a high profile Australian scientist from Sydney appeared in JBC (and other journals). No reason was provided. Since only the senior author was the common author in all retracted papers, it is not clear whether his other work can be trusted. Yet, no comments or statements from his institution have been published. In the mean time the alleged scientist keeps winning awards.
Thanks for that information, Mark. Care to give me some more details? (Just email me the senior author’s name, maybe?) We might have a dig around.
I am in agreement with the practice of not only identifying retracted papers with high visibility (e.g., electronic alerts via PubMed and the original journal, as well as other publically accessible vehicles, such as The Scientist and the lay press), but also with explicitly stating why the work was retracted. There is a pressing need to preserve and protect the accuracy of the scientific record: the cost to science, and potentially to human lives, when false, fabricated, or inaccurate data arise and persist in the literature could be enormous.
That’s a very good point Steven, thanks for your input.