Fang, with Casadevall, looked at retractions in (from?) his own journal and also reviewed retractions from a Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) survey of Medline, coming up with their own “retraction index”. Interestingly, while the rate of retraction is increasing, it’s not clear whether this is due to increasing disease or diagnosis–I’m reminded of this ADHD map
And, somewhat hearteningly, around 40% of retractions seem to be down to simple mistakes or something wrong with the reagents.
But the meat of the article is the “retraction index” part. There is “a surprisingly robust correlation” between this index and journal impact factor. The authors suggest “the probability that an article published in a higher journal will be retracted is higher than that of an article published in a lower impact journal.”
Although the link is still correlative, this does raise questions about the publication process (and sheds a very harsh light on bibliometric measures of ‘worth’). The authors, refreshingly, don’t see this as a failure of the peer review process, saying
When a prominent article is retracted, a common refrain is, “Why didn’t the reviewers catch that?” In fact, many would-be retractions are caught during the review process. However, without access to raw data, it is unrealistic to expect that even careful and highly motivated reviewers can detect all instances of falsification or fabrication.
This one is going to run for a while, I think, and maybe I should count up retractions of F1000-evaluated articles, too. I’ll let you know what I find.
In case you haven’t seen it already, there’s an intriguing new article in Infection and Immunity, Retracted Science and the Retraction Index . It’s by the Editor in Chief of Infect. Immun. Ferric C. Fang and Arturo Casadevall –Editor in Chief of mBio and long-serving F1000 Member in Medical Microbiology.
Fang, with Casadevall, looked at retractions in (from?) his own journal and also reviewed retractions from a Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) survey of Medline, coming up with their own “retraction index”. Interestingly, while the rate of retraction is increasing, it’s not clear whether this is due to increasing disease or diagnosis–I’m reminded of this ADHD map
And, somewhat hearteningly, around 40% of retractions seem to be down to simple mistakes or something wrong with the reagents.
But the meat of the article is the “retraction index” part. There is “a surprisingly robust correlation” between this index and journal impact factor. The authors suggest “the probability that an article published in a higher journal will be retracted is higher than that of an article published in a lower impact journal.”
Although the link is still correlative, this does raise questions about the publication process (and sheds a very harsh light on bibliometric measures of ‘worth’). The authors, refreshingly, don’t see this as a failure of the peer review process, saying
This one is going to run for a while, I think, and maybe I should count up retractions of F1000-evaluated articles, too. I’ll let you know what I find.