Are more scientific papers being retracted? It almost never happened in the past that a researcher would attempt to recall a defective article. First, almost nobody thought there was anything defective to retract, and second there was no effective mechanism for doing this. In the print era, journals went out to personal subscribers and libraries all over the world. How could you ‘recall’ them, even if you wanted to? In the electronic era, that part is a lot easier. In fact, it’s too easy in my view. But that’s another story. In a nice historical conjunction, the technical ability to recall a paper on once it has appeared has come along just at the time when the need for doing this is becoming more necessary. Some of the major indexing and abstracting services, such as MEDLINE, have tags which can be added to the database record once the proper authorities (authors or journal editors) have determined that an article must be pulled. RETRACTED PUBLICATION and RETRACTION OF PUBLICATION are reciprocal data elements that are supposed to note both ends of the process. Of course, MEDLINE takes care of the biomedical arena. What about the rest? Enter RETRACTION WATCH, a web site that goes out of its way to track down as many instances of publication retraction as it can locate. Each entry in RW notes the pubication to be yanked, and the reasons for the decision. I’ve only started watching it in the last two weeks or so. It seems to me, on the basis of that short acquaintance, that a fair number of the withdrawals are due to academic plagiarism: “creative recycling” of somebody else’s text. Some are due to manipulating charts, images and so forth, and some reports are based on ‘dry labbing’…publishing a study without having done any of the work.

You can see retraction watch at:

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If you want somebody to do something, give him money. That’s pretty basic economics and it often works. We could even say it usually works. But, not all the time. Some countries pay cash bonuses to investigators who publish in big-name journals. Others give ‘institutional’ rewards, such as, oh, funding. And some give not much of anything in direct monetary terms, but reputation. So, what happens in these three universes. Well, if you’re submitting to Sciencethose countries that pay cash on the barrel head see submissions go up but actual publication remains unaffected or goes down slightly. The ‘institutional’ crowd ditto and ditto. The last group saw both an increase in submissions and an increase in actual publications. This is a rough outline of what some investigators found in submissions to Science, and all the usual caveats prevail. A number of editors have noted a big jump in the number of low-quality manuscripts coming from Asia, where the cash bounty system is rather common. So, if any conclusions can be reached on this basis, it seems that bounty hunting increases the time and effort editors spend on DOA manuscripts simply because there are more of them now, but the cash system doesn’t ‘incentivize’ to use a horrid neologism, real publication.

All this is reviewed in an interesting post at The Scholarly Kitchen. That service is going on vacation for two weeks or so to recharge editorial batteries. Don’t blame them. I’d like to get away to someplace cool right now. But the worst of the hurricane season is upon us and we are reluctant to leave home in case something blows up while we are away.
Here

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