Costly collaborations: The impact of scientific fraud on co‐authors' careers

Abstract

Over the last few years, several major scientific fraud cases have shocked the scientific community. The number of retractions each year has also increased tremendously, especially in the biomedical field, and scientific misconduct accounts for approximately more than half of those retractions. It is assumed that co-authors of retracted papers are affected by their colleagues' misconduct, and the aim of this study is to provide empirical evidence of the effect of retractions in biomedical research on co-authors' research careers. Using data from the Web of Science (WOS), we measured the productivity, impact and collaboration of 1,123 co-authors of 293 retracted articles for a period of five years before and after the retraction. We found clear evidence that collaborators do suffer consequences of their colleagues' misconduct, and that a retraction for fraud has higher consequences than a retraction for error. Our results also suggest that the extent of these consequences is closely linked with the ranking of co-authors on the retracted paper, being felt most strongly by first authors, followed by the last authors, while the impact is less important for middle authors.

Guilt by Association: How Scientific Misconduct Harms Prior Collaborators

“…In the worst case, they are not complicit in producing a piece of false science and are stereotyped into fraudsters themselves. Empirical evidence supports this idea: co-authors of retracted studies see their citation rates drop Mongeon and Larivière, 2015). In our case, the scientists of interest were not directly involved in false science.…”

“…First, by drawing on the theory of social stigmatization (Goffman, 1963;Pontikes et al, 2010) we provide a general explanation for previously documented negative implications of scientific misconduct and retractions on closely related parties (Mongeon and Larivière, 2015) and the research field (Azoulay et al, 2014a). These articles employ three different mechanisms to describe their findings.…”

“…4 Second, our study focuses only on investigated cases of scientific misconduct in the field of medical research. Other than most of the previous studies that are based on retractions (Azoulay et al, 2015(Azoulay et al, , 2014aJin et al, 2013;Lu et al, 2013;Mongeon and Larivière, 2015), we base our findings on an analysis of the Findings of Research Misconduct published by the ORI, the central U.S. authority that is responsible for investigating scientific misconduct cases in biomedical research funded by the NIH throughout the country, between 1993 and 2008. This data constitutes a complete list of cases of scientific misconduct committed by NIH grant recipients and grant recipients at the PHS investigated by the ORI.…”

“…As it is not possible to personally verify all prior research results related to a planned project, science depends in great degree on trust. It is thus only rational that scientists shy away from the results of authors that have been involved in retractions in the past (Azoulay et al, 2015(Azoulay et al, , 2014aLu et al, 2013;Mongeon and Larivière, 2015).…”

A Multidimensional Investigation of the Effects of Publication Retraction on Scholarly Impact

“…Finally, similar to Lu et al (2013), they applied Poisson regression analysis to quantify the effect of retraction to the citation rate of related articles, whereas we used a nonparametric statistical test to compare the median of citation counts between retraction-related and control articles. Mongeon and Larivière (2015) found that scholars who once coauthored with fraudulent scholars suffered from a decline in their scholarly reputation and productivity, through designing comparative tests on data from WoS. Although we use a similar dataset and methodology, we reach a totally different conclusion.…”