What do Retraction Notices Reveal About Institutional Investigations into Allegations Underlying Retractions?

Academic journal publications may be retracted following institutional investigations that confirm allegations of research misconduct. Retraction notices can provide insight into the role institutional investigations play in the decision to retract a publication. Through a content analysis of 7,318 retraction notices published between 1927 and 2019 and indexed by the Web of Science, we found that most retraction notices (73.7%) provided no information about institutional investigations that may have led to retractions. A minority of the retraction notices (26.3%) mentioned an institutional investigation either by journal authorities (12.1%), research performing organizations (10.3%), joint institutions (1.9%), research integrity and ethics governing bodies (1.0%), third-party institutions (0.5%), unspecified institutions (0.4%), or research funding organizations (0.1%). Comparing retraction notices issued before and after the introduction of retraction guidelines by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) in 2009 revealed that those published after the guidelines' publication were more likely to report investigations by journal authorities. Comparing retraction notices from different disciplines revealed that those from social sciences and the humanities were more likely to disclose investigations by research performing organizations than those from biomedical and natural sciences. Based on these findings, we suggest that the COPE retraction guidelines in the future make it mandatory to disclose in retraction notices institutional investigations leading to retractions.

A cross-disciplinary and severity-based study of author-related reasons for retraction.

Previous research has found authors of retracted publications responsible for the vast majority of retractions. Although considerable research attention has been given to reasons for retraction, few studies have examined author-related reasons from a cross-disciplinary and a severity-based perspective. Drawing on data from the Web of Science Core Collection, this study examined 6,861 retraction notices published before 2020, in which authors were identified as the sole entities responsible for retraction. A close scrutiny identified 17 distinct reasons for retraction, with the three most frequent (i.e., plagiarism/self-plagiarism, unreliable data/findings, and data fabrication/falsification) accounting for 78.87% of the retraction notices. Based on the severity of the culpable actions involved, the 17 reasons were grouped into five categories: blatant misconduct (disclosed in 61.08% of the retraction notices), inappropriate conduct (18.18%), questionable conduct (0.95%), honest error (4.62%), and uncategorizable conduct (30.52%). Retraction notices in hard disciplines (i.e., natural sciences) were found more likely than those in soft disciplines (i.e., social sciences, arts, and the humanities) to disclose authorship issues, unreliable data/findings, uncategorizable conduct, and inappropriate conduct. Retraction notices in soft disciplines were more likely than those in hard disciplines to disclose unspecified misconduct and blatant misconduct.