Why and how do journals retract articles? An analysis of Medline retractions 1988–2008
Open accessAbstract
Background: Journal editors are responsible for what they publish and therefore have a duty to correct the record if published work is found to be unreliable. One method for such correction is retraction of an article. Anecdotal evidence suggested a lack of consistency in journal policies and practices regarding retraction. In order to develop guidelines, we reviewed retractions in Medline to discover how and why articles were retracted. Methods: We retrieved all available Medline retractions from 2005 to 2008 and a one-in-three random selection of those from 1988 to 2004. This yielded 312 retractions (from a total of 870). Details of the retraction including the reason for retraction were recorded by two investigators. Results: Medline retractions have increased sharply since 1980 and currently represent 0.02% of included articles. Retractions were issued by authors (63%), editors (21%), journals (6%), publishers (2%) and institutions (1%). Reasons for retraction included honest error or non-replicable findings (40%), research misconduct (28%), redundant publication (17%) and unstated/unclear (5%). Some of the stated reasons might have been addressed by corrections. Conclusions: Journals' retraction practices are not uniform. Some retractions fail to state the reason, and therefore fail to distinguish error from misconduct. We have used our findings to inform guidelines on retractions.
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These factors have contributed to the systematic underestimation of the role of misconduct and the overestimation of the role of error in retractions.
“These factors have contributed to the systematic underestimation of the role of misconduct and the overestimation of the role of error in retractions (3, 4), and speak to the need for uniform standards regarding retraction notices (5).”
From Misconduct accounts for the majority of retracted scientific publications (2012) · cites this paper as [5]
The Analysis of retractions says some notices used ambiguous wording and that the authors suspected some descriptions of inaccurate reporting were euphemisms for data falsification. This supports the possibility that misconduct was obscured, but the paper does not establish a systematic underestimation of misconduct or a corresponding overestimation of error. (LLM, conf=0.86)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredBetween 22% and 54% of retractions are due to methodological issues or concerns regarding data.
“between 22% and 54% of retractions are due to methodological issues or concerns regarding data, 8-12”
From Evaluating the Accuracy of scite, a Smart Citation Index (2023) · cites this paper as [9]
Authors who commit fraud may create variables that are too similar for unrelated variables, which can be assessed with coefficients of variation.
“Authors who commit fraud may come up with variables that are too similar for unrelated variables.This can be assessed with coefficients of variation.38”
From Assessing Research Misconduct in Randomized Controlled Trials (2021) · cites this paper as [38]
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“…has not been confirmed when observing the number of article retractions (Fanelli, Costas, and Lariviere 2015), probably because publication retraction may be a very crude measure of research misconduct and may not distinguish honest error from unethical behavior (Wager and Williams 2011).”
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“People using retracted science and evaluating authors of retracted science demand additional context about retraction to both clean up the literature and disincentivize misconduct [101].”
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A survey of retractions in the cardiovascular literature
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A Novel Rubric for Rating the Quality of Retraction Notices
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“This differs from a previous study [11], with 17% more author retractions.”
ResultRetractions in the Engineering Field: A Study on the Web of Science Database
Rubbo, P., Lievore, C., dos Santos, C. B., & Pìlatti, L. A. (2017) · Ethics & Behavior · doi:10.1080/10508422.2017.1390667 · Cited by 38 · see citing works
“…studies have analyzed retractions, including the work by Almeida et al. (2014), Steen (2011), Steen et al. (2013), Sox and Rennie (2006), and Wager and Williams (2011) on medicine; Fang, Stee, and Casadevall (2012) and Foo (2011), who studied the areas of biomedicine and life sciences; and…”
BackgroundAn investigation of retracted articles in the biomedical literature
Budd, J. M., Coble, Z., & Abritis, A. (2016) · Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology · doi:10.1002/pra2.2016.14505301055 · Cited by 36 · see citing works
“Wager and Williams (2011) have also analysed retractions to biomedical papers.”
BackgroundAnalysis of Retracted Publications in The Biomedical Literature from Turkey
Koçyiğit, B. F., & Akyol, A. (2022) · Journal of Korean Medical Science · doi:10.3346/jkms.2022.37.e142 · Cited by 36 · see citing works
Scientific Misconduct in Psychology
Stricker, J., & Günther, A. (2019) · Zeitschrift für Psychologie · doi:10.1027/2151-2604/a000356 · Cited by 36 · see citing works
“For example, Fang et al. (2012) consulted further information in addition to the retraction notices to classify reasons for retractions whereas other authors did not (e.g., Wager & Williams, 2011).”
BackgroundInfluentialRetracted publications in pharmacy systematic reviews
Brown, S. J., Bakker, C., & Theis-Mahon, N. R. (2022) · Journal of the Medical Library Association JMLA · doi:10.5195/jmla.2022.1280 · Cited by 35 · see citing works
“Ambiguity and a lack of context or detail may obscure the severity of the problem [10, 49, 50].”
BackgroundRetractedCorrection and retraction practices in library and information science journals
Ajiferuke, I., & Adekannbi, J. O. (2020) · Journal of Librarianship and Information Science · doi:10.1177/0961000618785408 · Cited by 33 · see citing works
“Earlier, Wager and Williams (2011) reported that 40% of retracted articles in Medline were attributable to honest error or nonreplicable findings, while only 28% were due to research misconduct.”
BackgroundResultInfluentialWhy Is Redundant Publication a Problem?
Wager, E. (2015) · The International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine · doi:10.15171/ijoem.2015.530 · Cited by 33 · see citing works
“Occasionally, an article gets published more than once because of an administrative error by the journal or publisher.(8) In such cases, the retraction should clearly indicate that the authors were not at fault and state the cause of the repetition.”
BackgroundSelf-citationWhen beauty is but skin deep: dealing with problematic studies in systematic reviews
Boughton, S. L., Wilkinson, J., & Bero, L. (2021) · Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews · doi:10.1002/14651858.ed000152 · Cited by 32 · see citing works
Identification of retracted publications and completeness of retraction notices in public health
Bakker, C. J., Reardon, E. E., Brown, S. J., Theis-Mahon, N., Schroter, S., Bouter, L., & Zeegers, M. P. (2024) · Journal of Clinical Epidemiology · doi:10.1016/j.jclinepi.2024.111427 · Cited by 32 · see citing works
The landscape of urological retractions: the prevalence of reported research misconduct
Mena, J., Ndoye, M., Cohen, A. J., Kamal, P., & Breyer, B. (2019) · BJU International · doi:10.1111/bju.14706 · Cited by 29 · see citing works
Self-correction in science: The effect of retraction on the frequency of citations
Kühberger, A., Streit, D., & Scherndl, T. (2022) · PLoS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0277814 · Cited by 33 · see citing works
“The proportion of retractions was increasing around the beginning of the millennium and was evaluated to be plateauing in recent years by some authors [3, 4].”
BackgroundUpdated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators including retraction dataPreprint
Ioannidis, J. P. A., Pezzullo, A. M., Cristiano, A., Boccia, S., & Baas, J. (2024) · bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · doi:10.1101/2024.09.16.613258 · Cited by 30 · see citing works
“Unfortunately, these are often not presented in sufficient detail to allow safe judgements (11,22).”
BackgroundRetracted articles in surgery journals. What are surgeons doing wrong?
Cassão, B. D., Herbella, F. A. M., Schlottmann, F., & Patti, M. G. (2018) · Surgery · doi:10.1016/j.surg.2018.01.015 · Cited by 32 · see citing works
RetractedCitation of Retracted Articles in Engineering: A Study of the Web of Science Database
Rubbo, P., Pìlatti, L. A., & Picinin, C. T. (2018) · Ethics & Behavior · doi:10.1080/10508422.2018.1559064 · Cited by 35 · see citing works
“In the literature, several authors have analyzed retractions: Sox and Rennie (2006), Wager and Williams (2011), Almeida et al. (2016a), Steen (2011), and Steen, Casadevall, and Fang (2013) focused on the area of medicine; Foo (2011) and Fang, Steen, and Casadevall (2012) assessed retractions in…”
BackgroundManaging research misconduct: is anyone getting it right?
Tavare, A. N. (2011) · BMJ · doi:10.1136/bmj.d8212 · Cited by 30 · see citing works
RNA biomarkers in colorectal cancer
Bustin, S. A., & Murphy, J. (2012) · Methods · doi:10.1016/j.ymeth.2012.10.003 · Cited by 29 · see citing works
Huh, S. Y., Kim, S. Y., & Cho, H. M. (2016) · PLoS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0163588 · Cited by 32 · see citing works
“On the other hand, unidentified reasons comprised only 5% of the data in Wager and Williams [5], 8.2% in Steen [4], and 1.5% of 235 retractions from Medline from 1966 through August 1997 [7].”
BackgroundResultInfluentialWhat time-lag for a retraction search on PubMed?
Decullier, É., Huot, L., & Maisonneuve, H. (2014) · BMC Research Notes · doi:10.1186/1756-0500-7-395 · Cited by 30 · see citing works
“Findings To investigate fraud and errors, scientists have studied cohorts of retraction notices [1-6].”
BackgroundCorrecting the literature: Improvement trends seen in contents of retraction notices
Deculllier, E., & Maisonneuve, H. (2018) · BMC Research Notes · doi:10.1186/s13104-018-3576-2 · Cited by 27 · see citing works
Bakker, C., Boughton, S., Faggion, C. M., Fanelli, D., Kaiser, K., & Schneider, J. (2024) · BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine · doi:10.1136/bmjebm-2022-111921 · Cited by 28 · see citing works
“5 10 This rise is unlikely to be caused by any increase in the prevalence of scientific misconduct, but instead may be due to the increasing ability and propensity of journals to retract problematic publications.”
BackgroundEthical publishing in intensive care medicine: A narrative review
Wiedermann, C. J. (2016) · World Journal of Critical Care Medicine · doi:10.5492/wjccm.v5.i3.171 · Cited by 26 · see citing works
Fraud in scientific publications in the European Union. An analysis through their retractions.
Cuenca, G. M., Oliván, J. A. S., & Avilés, R. A. (2021) · Scientometrics · doi:10.1007/s11192-021-03977-0 · Cited by 29 · see citing works
“Retrac‑ tions must also be handled with great care; withdrawing a published article may not be easy and is one of the most serious sanctions for researchers, which may cause irreparable damage to their reputation and academic career (Wager & Williams, 2011).”
BackgroundRetractions of scientific publications: responsibility and accountability
Katavić, V. (2014) · Biochemia Medica · doi:10.11613/bm.2014.024 · Cited by 25 · see citing works
“Whether the reasons for most retractions are fraudulent results begotten of research misconduct (9,14), or not (15), and whether there is an increase in plagiarism and duplicate publications (16) still needs to be ascertained, but the evidence-based understanding of the problem may be skewed by the journals’ retractio…”
BackgroundRetraction Notices: Who Authored Them?
Xu, S. B., & Hu, G. (2018) · Publications · doi:10.3390/publications6010002 · Cited by 27 · see citing works
“The few studies that needed to ascertain RN authorship to address their research questions unproblematically treated retraction requestors and/or performers as RN authors [19,20].”
BackgroundReview of retracted papers in the field of neurology
Wang, X., Gao, N., Chen, H., & Wang, W. (2023) · European Journal of Neurology · doi:10.1111/ene.15960 · Cited by 23 · see citing works
“However, recent studies have reclassified many papers labeled as “retracted due to errors” as “due to misconduct” [11, 27].”
BackgroundRossouw, T. M., Matsau, L., & van Zyl, C. (2020) · Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics · doi:10.1177/1556264620955110 · Cited by 22 · see citing works
“…in retractions serving as indicator of increased levels of awareness, better methods or software applications to detect problems, and a stronger culture of accountability and transparency in the scientific community (Fanelli, 2013; Hosseini et al., 2018; Van Noorden, 2011; Wager & Williams, 2011).”
BackgroundMethodWomen’s representation as authors of retracted papers in the biomedical sciences
Pinho‐Gomes, A., Hockham, C., & Woodward, M. (2023) · PLoS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0284403 · Cited by 22 · see citing works
“Although retractions are rare, their absolute number and relative proportion of published papers have been increasing over the past two decades [4, 5].”
BackgroundStatus of retraction notices for biomedical publications associated with research misconduct
Drimer-Batca, D. A., Iaccarino, J. M., & Fine, A. (2019) · Research Ethics · doi:10.1177/1747016118820496 · Cited by 21 · see citing works
Surveying Retracted Studies and Notices Within the Field of Radiation Oncology
Wasiak, J., Hamilton, D. G., Foroudi, F., & Faggion, C. M. (2018) · International Journal of Radiation Oncology*Biology*Physics · doi:10.1016/j.ijrobp.2018.06.028 · Cited by 22 · see citing works
Retracted articles in rehabilitation: just the tip of the iceberg? A bibliometric analysis
Bordino, M., Ravizzotti, E., & Vercelli, S. (2020) · Archives of Physiotherapy · doi:10.1186/s40945-020-00092-w · Cited by 23 · see citing works
“The issue of scientific misconduct has become a priority for many international journals and editorial boards especially after the publication in 2009 of the COPE guidelines on how to handle retractions [12].”
BackgroundRetractedA Survey of Iranian Retracted Publications Indexed in PubMed
Mansourzadeh, M. J., Ghazimirsaeid, J., Motamedi, N., Najafi, A., Abubakar, A. A., & Dehdarirad, H. (2021) · Iranian Journal of Public Health · doi:10.18502/ijph.v50i1.5086 · Cited by 20 · see citing works
“tracted to prevent misleading future readers (1).”
Damineni, R., Sardiwal, K., Waghle, S., & Dakshyani, M. (2015) · Journal of International Society of Preventive and Community Dentistry · doi:10.4103/2231-0762.151968 · Cited by 22 · see citing works
“[15] Wager et al.,[9] in their study of retractions between 1988 and 2008, found that 5% of the retracted articles did not state the reason for retraction.”
BackgroundInfluentialRetraction according to gender: A descriptive study
Decullier, É., & Maisonneuve, H. (2021) · Accountability in Research · doi:10.1080/08989621.2021.1988576 · Cited by 20 · see citing works
“Although this underrepresentation of women in publication is a proven fact, there is no information on its counterpart: retractions, the number of which has been steadily increasing since 1988 (Wager and Williams 2011).”
BackgroundRetracted papers by Iranian authors: causes, journals, time lags, affiliations, collaborations
Ghorbi, A., Fazeli-Varzaneh, M., Ghaderi-Azad, E., Ausloos, M., & Kozak, M. (2021) · Scientometrics · doi:10.1007/s11192-021-04104-9 · Cited by 22 · see citing works
Xu, S. B., Evans, N., Hu, G., & Bouter, L. M. (2023) · Science and Engineering Ethics · doi:10.1007/s11948-023-00442-4 · Cited by 19 · see citing works
“…15 What do Retraction Notices Reveal About Institutional Investigations… as identities of misbehaving researchers and disciplinary actions taken against them (Xu & Hu, 2022a) or to prevent possible litigations from authors of retracted publications (COPE Council, 2009, 2019; Wager & Williams 2011).”
BackgroundOrtega, J. L. (2020) · Learned Publishing · doi:10.1002/leap.1339 · Cited by 19 · see citing works
“Wager and Williams (2011) used a Medline sample, observing a steady increase in retractions in the period 1999–2009.”
Method
- Authors
- Wager, E., & Williams, P.
- Affiliations
- University College London (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Wager, Elizabeth
- Venue
- Journal of Medical Ethics
- Publisher
- BMJ
- Published
- 2011-04-12
- Volume
- 37
- Issue
- 9
- Pages
- 567-570
- ISSN
- 0306-6800 (ISSN-L)
- 1473-4257
- OpenAlex
- W2129970316
- Cited by
- 263
- References
- 14
- Citations by year
- 2026: 13 · 2025: 18 · 2024: 19 · 2023: 20 · 2022: 20 · 2021: 23 · 2020: 17 · 2019: 17 · 2018: 18 · 2017: 21 · 2016: 13 · 2015: 11 · 2014: 19 · 2013: 13 · 2012: 17
- FWCI
- 43.58
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- public-domain
- Locations
- Journal of Medical Ethics (publishedVersion, public-domain)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Academic integrity and plagiarism
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Publishing and Scholarly Communication
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Academic Publishing and Open Access
- Keywords
- retraction, retraction reasons, research misconduct, duplicate publication, journal editorial policy, MEDLINE, research integrity
- MeSH terms
- Humans, Periodicals as Topic, Publishing, Research, Research Design, Retraction of Publication as Topic, Scientific Misconduct, MEDLINE, Ethics, Research, Editorial Policies, Biomedical Research
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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