Retraction Notices: Who Authored Them?

Abstract

Unlike other academic publications whose authorship is eagerly claimed, the provenance of retraction notices (RNs) is often obscured presumably because the retraction of published research is associated with undesirable behavior and consequently carries negative consequences for the individuals involved. The ambiguity of authorship, however, has serious ethical ramifications and creates methodological problems for research on RNs that requires clear authorship attribution. This article reports a study conducted to identify RN textual features that can be used to disambiguate obscured authorship, ascertain the extent of authorship evasion in RNs from two disciplinary clusters, and determine if the disciplines varied in the distributions of different types of RN authorship. Drawing on a corpus of 370 RNs archived in the Web of Science for the hard discipline of Cell Biology and the soft disciplines of Business, Finance, and Management, this study has identified 25 types of textual markers that can be used to disambiguate authorship, and revealed that only 25.68% of the RNs could be unambiguously attributed to authors of the retracted articles alone or jointly and that authorship could not be determined for 28.92% of the RNs. Furthermore, the study has found marked disciplinary differences in the different categories of RN authorship. These results point to the need for more explicit editorial requirements about RN authorship and their strict enforcement.

Science Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry? Apologies for Scientific Misconduct

“…Hence, the apology and the responsibility cannot be attributed to a specific actor. This tendency of apologies to blur the actual speakers mirrors the tendency of retractions to cloud their own authorship (Hu & Xu, 2018), which is also very prominent in the present sample.…”

“…All results were manually checked for false positives, before drawing a random sample stratified by period for JSTOR (1980-1989, 1990-1999, 2000-2014), and for WOS (1990-1999 and 2000-2014), while all notices identified in EconBiz were used. 2 Being a relatively new format, retraction notices have received little attention from a discourse analytical perspective (but see Hu & Xu, 2018). To provide an overview of the characteristics of this emerging textual format, we employed a genre-based perspective on English for Academic Purposes as a "workable way to make sense of the myriad communicative events that occur in the contemporary English-speaking academy" (Swales, 1990, p. 1).…”

“…Being a relatively new format, retraction notices have received little attention from a discourse analytical perspective (but see Hu & Xu, 2018). To provide an overview of the characteristics of this emerging textual format, we employed a genre-based perspective on English for Academic Purposes as a “workable way to make sense of the myriad communicative events that occur in the contemporary English-speaking academy” (Swales, 1990, p. 1).…”

Is there a need for creators of imaginary authors to face legal consequences?

“…Screening and detection by peers and editors was unable to prevent this paper with false elements from being published, so editors should be held accountable to some extent ( 16 ), although editorial oversight resulting from deception by false authors should be forgiven without attaching a stigma to it ( 17 ). The relative opacity of the retraction notice is another problem ( 18 ).…”

Beyond Plagiarism: Scientific Ethics and Its Other Aspects

“…. has serious ethical ramifications and creates methodological problems for research on RNs that requires clear authorship attribution" [4]. Their study identified some RN textual features that could be used "to disambiguate obscured authorship".…”