Retraction of publications: a study of biomedical journals retracting publications based on impact factor and journal category / Retractación de publicaciones: estudio de los artículos de retractación de revistas biomédicas basado en el factor de impacto y la categoría de la revista

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVE: To describe the biomedical journal characteristics that are associated with the retraction of papers. METHOD: A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted. All papers retracted and indexed in PubMed from January 1st 2013 to December 31st, 2016 were included. We used nine main categories to classify retractions: aspects related with data, authors issues, plagiarism, unethical research, journal issues, review process, conflict of interest, other, and unknown. These categories were further classified as: misconduct, suspicion of misconduct, or no misconduct. RESULTS: The proportion of retraction was 2.5 per 10,000 publications. Retractions appeared in 611 journals. During the study period, retraction due to misconduct was more frequent among journals with low-impact factor. Within these retracted publications, among low-impact journals the presence of misconduct was higher with a 73% compared to 61% for the high-impact journals (p = 0.001). There were differences in the percentage of retractions due to misconduct regarding the journal classification category (p < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: Retraction of publications is present in both high- and low-impact factor biomedical journals, but misconduct is more frequent among the papers retracted from lower impact journals. Measures before and after publication should be taken to limit misconduct