Why articles are retracted: a retrospective cross-sectional study of retraction notices at BioMed Central

Elizabeth C. Moylan

212 citations0/0 files storedBMJ Open

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Academic integrity and plagiarism Publishing and Scholarly Communication Academic Publishing and Open Access

Abstract

OBJECTIVES: To assess why articles are retracted from BioMed Central journals, whether retraction notices adhered to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines, and are becoming more frequent as a proportion of published articles. DESIGN/SETTING: Retrospective cross-sectional analysis of 134 retractions from January 2000 to December 2015. RESULTS: 134 retraction notices were published during this timeframe. Although they account for 0.07% of all articles published (190 514 excluding supplements, corrections, retractions and commissioned content), the rate of retraction is rising. COPE guidelines on retraction were adhered to in that an explicit reason for each retraction was given. However, some notices did not document who retracted the article (eight articles, 6%) and others were unclear whether the underlying cause was honest error or misconduct (15 articles, 11%). The largest proportion of notices was issued by the authors (47 articles, 35%). The majority of retractions were due to some form of misconduct (102 articles, 76%), that is, compromised peer review (44 articles, 33%), plagiarism (22 articles, 16%) and data falsification/fabrication (10 articles, 7%). Honest error accounted for 17 retractions (13%) of which 10 articles (7%) were published in error. The median number of days from publication to retraction was 337.5 days. CONCLUSIONS: The most common reason to retract was compromised peer review. However, the majority of these cases date to March 2015 and appear to be the result of a systematic attempt to manipulate peer review across several publishers. Retractions due to plagiarism account for the second largest category and may be reduced by screening manuscripts before publication although this is not guaranteed. Retractions due to problems with the data may be reduced by appropriate data sharing and deposition before publication. Adopting a checklist (linked to COPE guidelines) and templates for various classes of retraction notices would increase transparency of retraction notices in future.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 212 citations exist upstream.

References

2007Strengthening the reporting of observational studies in epidemiology (STROBE) statement: guidelines for reporting observational studies 2015Bibliometrics: The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics 2009How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data 2012Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications 2013Why Has the Number of Scientific Retractions Increased?2012A Comprehensive Survey of Retracted Articles from the Scholarly Literature 2011Why and how do journals retract articles? An analysis of Medline retractions 1988–2008 1998Phenomena of Retraction

Cited by

2019Ten Hot Topics around Scholarly Publishing 2019The limitations of retraction notices and the heroic acts of authors who correct the scholarly record: An analysis of retractions of papers published from 1975 to 2019 2017Plagiarism in the Context of Education and Evolving Detection Strategies 2019Plagiarism and data falsification are the most common reasons for retracted publications in obstetrics and gynaecology 2018

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.