NAHSL: News

Kelli Kauffroath: Why Retractions are Good for the Scientific Record

Reflections on the NAHSL Annual Meeting by NAHSL Annual Meeting Scholarship Winner Kelli Kauffroath

Why Retractions are Good for the Scientific Record

In his NAHSL Conference 2022 keynote speech, Retractions are on the Rise – But Not Enough,

Dr. Ivan Oransky shared with attendees the process of scientific manuscript retraction and why it is important for research integrity in academic publishing.  

According to Dr. Oransky, most retracted scientific papers are due to misconduct, not honest error. In the last 20 years, retractions increased from 40, in the year 2000, to 4000 in 2022, and begs the question “is misconduct is on the rise?” Dr. Oransky suggests that a “screening effect” is capturing the falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism (FFP) responsible for the remarkable rise in retractions rather than an increase in misconduct. This effect originated in 2006-2007 with plagiarism detection software programs used by publishers to detect the traditional plagiarism of others’ work, and the publication of previously printed work or self-plagiarism.

At the same time, academic papers were beginning to be published online and this allowed people to really drill down and analyze the data presented. “Sleuths” who make it their mission to locate and identify problems with research publications (doing the work that peer-reviewers should be doing) are finding faked data and data visualization manipulation like photoshopped data plots, proving scholarly authors can and do get misconducted research past the gatekeeping process of peer-review. Other reasons for retractions include fake peer reviews, publisher error, authorship issues, legal reasons, and non-reproducible results.

Despite this quest to identify significant errors and/or misconduct, scholarly publishing is slow to self-correct. Dr. Oransky shared that retractions can take 35 months, encompasses only a tiny fraction of published scientific literature, and makes one ponder how many fraudulent papers go by undetected. Bizarrely, retracted papers continue to be cited without any mention of retracted status, and researcher authors may even include a retracted paper in support of their research. This is known as zombie literature, or retracted literature that unknowing authors continue to cite (see Top 10 Most Highly Cited Retracted Papers). 

The good news is Retraction Watch Database, a comprehensive, open access database of 36,000 retractions, makes retraction data available to researchers at retractiondatabase.org. EndNote 20.2 or higher now identifies and highlights retracted articles based upon their inclusion in the Retraction Watch Database. Publishers are hiring research integrity managers to catch misconduct and at PubPeer individuals can leave anonymous comments on any scientific publications possessing a recognizable identifier: DOI, PID, ArXiv. Authors are notified when a comment is made on their paper through PubPeer. COPEis an organization that contributes to the normalization of publication ethics in publishing culture. 

At the end of his presentation, Dr. Oransky offered some suggestions for improving research integrity in scientific publication. From publishing peer reviews to fade opacity, to encouraging good behavior by incentivizing authors to withdraw and correct flawed papers themselves rather than having those papers retracted by publishers. Normalizing the concept of admitting honest errors, how they occur, and how to prevent them in the future is an important contribution to research integrity, transparency, and the scientific knowledge base. 

Kelli Kauffroath, MLIS

Health Sciences Librarian

Dana Medical Library

The University of Vermont