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Back in August I mentioned an article in Infection and Immunity on retractions, intriguingly titled Retracted Science and the Retraction Index. The authors are the Editor in Chief of Infect. Immun. Ferric C. Fang and Arturo Casadevall–Editor in Chief of mBio F1000 Member in Medical Microbiology. Their major finding was that journals with high impact factors tend to have a higher retraction index: that is, the number of retracted articles divided by total published articles, multiplied by 1000.

I’ve done a little analysis of the F1000 data: on a per-journal basis I took the number of evaluated articles that have subsequently been retracted in the period 2001 to 2011, divided that by the number of articles evaluated by F1000 in the same period, and multiplied by 1000 (per Fang and Casadevall). Now, the resulting graph of the 2010 F1000 Journal Factor (red) versus F1000 Retraction Index (blue) is a little crowded, but that’s almost an inverse correlation, don’t you think?

(click through for a larger PDF)

Microb Pathog and Cognition don’t have an F1000 Journal Factor (FFj) before 2009 (which is as far back as we calculate). Cognition however had one retraction out of nine evaluated articles back to 2001, giving it an F1000 Retraction Index of 111. Br J Ophthalmol had one retraction and 14 articles evaluated, making its Index 71.4. The FFjs for FEMS Micro Lett, Mol Endocrinol and Plant Physiol are from 2009, by the way, as they weren’t evaluated in 2010.

Now, there’s obviously a problem with small numbers of retractions, but it’s an interesting graph. And there’s (also obviously) much more one could do with these numbers, more than I have time for right now–which is why I’m going to put the F1000 retraction and article counts in this Google Doc for you to play around with if you like. But, seeing as some of you have asked, here’s another interesting graph. For the journals in the Fang & Casadevall analysis, and those with retractions on F1000, here’s a graph of the FFj (red) against the 2010 Journal Impact Factor. Again, click through for a closer look.