A multi-perspective analysis of retractions in life sciences

Abstract

The aim of this study is to explore trends in retracted publications in life sciences and biomedical sciences over axes like time, countries, journals and impact factors, and topics. Nearly seven thousand publications, which comprise the entirety of retractions visible through PubMed as of August 2019, were used. This work involved sophisticated data collection and analysis techniques to use data from PubMed, Wikipedia, and WikiData, and study it with respect to the above mentioned axes. Importantly, I employ state-of-the-art analysis and visualization techniques from natural language processing (NLP) to understand the topics in retracted literature. To highlight a few results, the analyses demonstrate an increasing rate of retraction over time and noticeable differences in the publication quality (as measured by journal impact factor) among top countries. Moreover, while molecular biology and cancer dominate retractions, we also see a number of retractions not related to biology. The methods and results of this study can be applied to continuously understand the nature and evolution of retractions in life sciences, thus contributing to the health of this research ecosystem.

Characteristics of retracted editorial articles in the biomedical literature

“…3 ). The average retraction time (from publication to retraction) is 2.48 years, which is short in comparison to previous studies; 2.86 years for Indian biomedical literature (Elango, 2021 ) and 3.8 years for life-sciences literature (Bhatt, 2021 ). Two editorials have been retracted with the longest durations of 11 and 13 years respectively; both were written by the same author and were retracted for citing fraudulent works.…”

“…With 36%, the USA leads the countries, followed by France (12%), Germany (12%), and Canada (12%). Not surprisingly, the USA was not only the highest ranking country in the world in terms of the number of retractions in the field of life sciences (Bhatt, 2021 ), but also the top-ranked country in terms of producing high-quality research output (Nature Index, 2021 ). The top six countries are all members of the G7 group, which has a stronghold in a variety of research areas (Elango et al, 2013 ).…”

“…Examining the retractions has been of growing interest in recent times. Aspura et al ( 2018 ), Bhatt ( 2021 ), Campos-Varela et al ( 2020 ), Elango et al ( 2019 ), Moradi et al ( 2018 ), Rubbo et al ( 2019 ), Samuel et al ( 2020 ), Saikia and Thakuria ( 2019 ), and Wray and Andersen ( 2018 ) are examples of such investigations. These studies are focused on a single country or discipline or journal or author.…”

Correction of the scientific production: publisher performance evaluation using a dataset of 4844 PubMed retractions

“…Using the same logic (one retracted article/ journal) would result, in the most optimistic scenario, another 5464 journals with withdrawn articles, which, added to 1767 in our batch would bring the total to 7,231, just over 20% of the total number of journals registered in PubMed. However, we are helped here by a study published in 2021 (Bhatt 2021), which analyzed 6936 PubMed retracted articles (up to August 2019) and identified 2102 different journals, of which 54,4% had only one article withdrawn.…”

“…For example, in the case of PubMed retractions, the year 2020 was a record year in terms of withdrawal notes, targeting 878 articles published in more than 12 years. (Toma and Padureanu 2021) The withdrawals in the biomedical journals indexed in PubMed represent an intensely researched topic in the last two decades, numerous articles making valuable contributions in this field (Nath et al 2006;Redman et al 2008;Wager and Williams 2011;Steen 2011;Samp et al 2012;Fang et al 2012;Steen et al 2013;Decullier et al 2013;Madlock-Brown and Eichmann 2015;Mongeon and Larivière 2016;Rosenkrantz 2016;Pantziarka and Meheus 2019;Rapani et al 2020;Bhatt 2021). However, there is little information on the article retractions at the publisher level and, therefore, an incomplete picture of the challenges/difficulties they face in the post-publication quality control of products delivered to consumers of scientific information.…”