…over the past decade, a growing cohort of research-integrity sleuths have been checking the text, images and data of scientific articles. They have found flaws in what’s estimated to be hundreds of thousands of papers. That, in turn, has led many publishers to scrutinize their own processes, resulting in a rise in retracted research: some 0.2% of articles published in 2022 are now retracted, a rate that’s triple what it was a decade ago.
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Although retractions can be the result of discovering an honest mistake and are a necessary part of the scientific process, the vast majority of papers are withdrawn for dishonesty or fraud, according to the site Retraction Watch, which maintains a public database of retractions.
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In general, there is little consistency in how publishers record and communicate retractions — although last year, publishers did agree, under the auspices of the US National Information Standards Organization, on a unified technical standard for doing this, which might help to improve matters.
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Retraction Watch is to be commended for pushing hard to improve how retractions are recorded, and for creating a relatively clean database of retractions on which further tools and analyses, including those used in Nature’s analysis, can be built
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
