Top researchers in India, China more likely to have retractions

Leading researchers working in some of the emerging Asian science powerhouses are significantly more likely to have had at least one journal paper retracted than academics working in major Western sectors, it has been revealed.

Scholars at Stanford University collaborated with publisher Elsevier to link retraction records held in the database maintained by Retraction Watch to lists of the top 2 per cent most highly cited researchers in each academic subfield, finding that roughly one in 25 had had at least one paper retracted during their careers.

The exact figures were 4 per cent, based on a list of the most cited researchers in 2023, or 3.3 per cent, going off a list of the top-cited scientists in career-long impact, according to a paper published in Plos Biology on 30 January.

Most had only one retraction, with only about one in 100 having two or more, but a small number had 10 or more, say the Stanford researchers, led by John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine, epidemiology and population health.

The most highly cited researchers were significantly more likely to have had work retracted, with 13.8 per cent and 11.1 per cent of the top 1,000 scientists from across the databases having had at least one paper pulled, based on the career-long and single-year lists respectively.

A number of other factors affected how likely highly cited researchers were to have had papers retracted. Scholars with retracted articles tended to have a higher total number of publications and a higher rate of co-authorship, for example.

“High productivity and more extensive co-authorship may be associated with less control over what gets published or may show proficiency in gaming the system (eg, have honorary authorship as department chair),” the paper says.

“Nevertheless, the higher publication output of scientists with retractions might simply reflect that the more you publish, the greater the chance of encountering eventually a retraction.”

More than half of the highly cited scientists with retractions were in medicine and the life sciences, with subfields in the arts, humanities and social sciences having very low, or even zero, numbers of retractions.

These differences, the paper says, “might reflect the increased scrutiny and better detection of misconduct and major errors in fields that have consequences for health; differences in the intensity and types of post-publication review practices; and the fact that quantifiable data and images in the life sciences are easier to assess for errors and fraud than many constructs in social sciences”.

There was also significant variation by country, including among the 20 nations hosting the most top-cited authors. Going off the career-long list, 9.2 per cent of leading Indian researchers had at least one retraction, with high rates also observed in China (6.7 per cent), Taiwan (5.7 per cent) and South Korea (5.3 per cent).

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This compares with figures of 3.1 per cent for the US and 2.4 per cent for the UK, with other major Western research sectors also within this range.

Outside the top 20, retraction rates ran as high as 50 per cent in Kyrgyzstan, 41.7 per cent in Senegal, 28 per cent in Ecuador and 26.7 per cent in Belarus, although this is based on very small numbers of top-cited authors.

“Many developing countries have extremely high rates of top-cited authors with retracted papers. This may reflect problematic research environments and incentives in these countries, several of which are also rapidly growing their overall productivity,” the paper says.

Ioannidis and Stanford co-authors Angelo Maria Pezzullo, Antonio Cristiano and Stefania Boccia, with Elsevier collaborator Jeroen Baas, caution that “even though we excluded retractions that attributed no fault to the authors, we cannot be confident that all the included retractions included some error, let alone misconduct, by the authors”.

chris.havergal@timeshighereducation.com