How do academia and society react to erroneous or deceitful claims? The case of retracted articles’ recognition

Abstract

Researchers give credit to peer-reviewed, and thus, credible publications through citations. Despite a rigorous reviewing process, certain articles undergo retraction due to disclosure of their ethical or scientific deficiencies. It is, therefore, important to understand how society and academia react to the erroneous or deceitful claims and purge the science of their unreliable results. Applying a matched-pairs research design, this study examined a sample of medicine-related retracted and non-retracted articles matched by their content similarity. The regression analysis revealed similarities in obsolescence trends of the retracted and non-retracted groups. The Generalized Estimating Equations showed that citations are affected by the retraction status, life after retraction, life cycle and the journals’ previous reputation, with the two formers being the strongest in positively predicting the citations. The retracted papers obtain fewer citations either before or after retraction, implying academia’s watchful reaction to the low-quality papers even before official announcement of their fallibility. They exhibit an equal or higher social recognition level regarding Tweets and Blog Mentions, while a lower status regarding Mendeley Readership. This could signify social users’ sensibility regarding scientific quality since they probably publicise the retraction and warn against the retracted items in their tweets or blogs, while avoiding recording them in their Mendeley profiles. Further scrutiny is required to gain insight into the sensibility, if any, about scientific quality. The study’s originality relies on matching the retracted and non-retracted papers with their topics and neutralising variations in their citation potentials. It is also the first study comparing the groups’ social impacts.