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

Abstract

Retractions of journal articles exclude fraudulent or erroneous research from legitimate science and perform boundary work. Analyzing retractions from different disciplines and focusing on their apologetic aspects, we find that these apologies shift between openly addressing emotional, normative, and social themes and concealing them in a more scientific style of communication. Their boundary work remains highly ambivalent: They alternate between scientific and nonscientific forms of speaking, portray unstable patterns of control and coercion, and avoid drawing a boundary between legitimate and nonlegitimate science. In line with the hypothetical nature of scientific knowledge, retractions thus leave boundary making to the future.

Cycles of invisibility: The limits of transparency in dealing with scientific misconduct

“…The second dataset consists of 127 retraction notices (see also Hesselmann and Reinhart, 2019) that inform readers about articles retracted for fraud, plagiarism or honest mistakes. Retraction notices were sampled using the databases Web of Science (53), EconBiz (41) and JSTOR (33).…”

“…In either case, they are an important format for communicating details about investigations to a wider public and hence to contribute to, or to cloud, the transparency of those processes. As has been shown elsewhere (Hesselmann, 2018;Hesselmann and Reinhart, 2019), retraction notices are generally short on details and offer only minimal information about the scientific problem under investigation and on the investigations themselves, often creating ambiguity instead of providing clarification. Building on the struggles with institutional visibility identified in the interviews, this analysis focuses on the question of how institutional actors and their respective activities and responsibilities are made visible (or concealed) in retraction notices.…”

“…We identified from the data twelve general textual moves: discussing problems with the original paper, retracting the paper, apologizing, providing excuses, allocating blame, expressing disapproval, explaining further steps, providing links to other documents, discussing authors’ positions on the retraction, introducing quotations, detailing publication history and acknowledging other researchers (see also Hesselmann and Reinhart, 2019). Such a variety of moves indicates that retraction notices are highly variable texts, and are used for a number of different purposes.…”

Agency and responsibility: A linguistic analysis of culpable acts in retraction notices

“…In most cases, it is through retraction notices (RNs) that the mechanism of retraction operates. Drawing on RNs as their major data sources, extant studies have investigated various aspects of the phenomenon of retraction, but only a few of them (Hesselmann & Reinhart, 2019;Marcus & Oransky, 2015;Authors, 2018, in press) have examined RNs from a linguistic perspective. RNs constitute a high-stakes academic genre (Authors, in press) because of their close association with academic misconduct (Budd, Abritis, & Coble, 2016;Fang et al, 2012;Lei & Zhang, 2018;Moylan & Kowalczuk, 2016), potential severe consequences (Azoulay, Bonatti, & Krieger, 2017;Lu et al, 2013;McCook, 2016;Oransky, 2014a;Salam, 2013;Stern, Casadevall, Steen, & Fang, 2014), and an inevitable tarnishing of the image and reputation of those held responsible for retractions (Authors, in press).…”