More leading American scientists have had papers retracted than the number of Chinese, British, Japanese and German researchers combined, according to a study published in PLOS Biology on January 30.
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Among scientists included in the Stanford Elsevier career-long list of the world’s top 2 per cent of scientists last year, some 2,322 US-affiliated elite researchers have had papers retracted in their career, compared with 877 top scientists affiliated with China.
Rounding out the top five are Britain with 430 researchers having papers retracted, Japan (362) and Germany (336).
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US declines to sign international declaration on artificial intelligence
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The authors make clear that retractions, while increasingly common, “still account for a small minority of published papers” and that a paper can be retracted for a variety of reasons.
“Not every retraction is a sign of misconduct,” John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University who led the study, told Nature News on January 31.
“But it is important to have a bird’s-eye view, across all scientific fields, people who are most influential in science.”
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The data comes from the Retraction Watch Database, a site focused on tracking and recording the withdrawal of academic papers around the world. It was launched in August 2010, having been created and maintained by the scientific monitoring organisation Retraction Watch.
Until August 15 last year, the database had more than 55,000 retraction records covering a range of disciplines.