Data sleuths’ work is thankless. They must get credit for retractions

In science, as in many fields, credit is the coin of the realm. That credit often comes in the form of citations, an acknowledgement that some other group – or your own, for that matter – came first. In hiring, tenure and promotion decisions, universities prize the h-index and other measures of citation counts. When it comes to retraction notices, however, some publishers would rather refuse credit to those whose efforts made it possible for them to correct the scientific record.

One of us (DBA) learned this the hard way recently – though not for the first time – when he asked that his team (in this case including Thirupathi Reddy, Yasaman Jamshidi-Naeini, Colby Vorland, Lilian Golzarri Arroyo and Luis Enrique Becerra Garcia) be named in an upcoming retraction notice that they had prompted. This was the latest in a series of corrections and retractions that his team had driven following meticulous analysis of scores of papers.

However, Thomas Tischler, a senior editor at the journal’s publisher, Springer Nature, responded that “by policy, we do not mention how the case came to us and do not acknowledge any external parties”. Saying that he had told other “sleuths” the same thing, Tischler continued: “This does not mean we do not value your work or the work of others helping us finding such cases, but in the end it is an editorial decision how we are proceeding with an article.”

We would suggest that failing to credit careful readers and other sleuths strongly suggests that Springer Nature does not in fact value their work. In US Congressional testimony in 2022, Chris Graf, the publisher’s head of research integrity, made a point of crediting his own team’s work in retracting numerous papers – but failed to mention the numerous sleuths who had worked for free, and often at great personal risk, to call problems to the publisher’s attention in the first place.

Graf later told one of us (IO) that he was making an “ad hoc comment”. He continued: “Had the response been something that was not off the cuff, however, I would of course have wished to reflect on how important [sleuths] are as a part of the ecosystem that works to preserve the publication record.”

One might understand Springer Nature’s position. After all, when publishers see publishing papers that later need to be retracted as harmful to their reputations – which Springer Nature acknowledged in the prospectus released before its recent initial public offering – taking credit for cleaning out the stables might remind investors – along with readers, librarians and others – of publishers’ value. It also may remind them, however, that peer review – a key pillar of that value – is highly fallible.

But that is no excuse to construct a false narrative. Dozens of sleuths around the world – some focusing on image manipulation, others on plagiarism, statistical anomalies and other issues – have put in countless hours doing painstaking work, driving thousands of retractions and corrections. Sometimes they get sued. It is the very definition of a thankless task, and failure to receive credit in resulting retraction notices is a stark reminder of that.

One could even argue that failing to publicly credit the work of sleuths, with their permission, is a form of plagiarism, consistent with the federal US definition: “the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit.” Failing to credit sleuths is also antithetical to the idea of realigning incentives to promote better science.

Springer Nature is far from alone in failing to give credit, though plenty of publishers have found themselves capable of doing so. Dozens of retraction notices in Elsevier journals, for instance, have name-checked well-known sleuth Elisabeth Bik, although the practice is not universal there either.

Elsewhere, a retraction notice in a Sage journal recently noted that its editors had been “alerted by the authors of [another] recent publication” about potential problems in the paper.

We’d urge publishers that have yet to adopt this approach to embrace transparency. The scientific record should reflect what actually happened, not a sanitised narrative that leaves out the messy bits.

Ivan Oransky is co-founder of Retraction Watch, distinguished journalist in residence at New York University and editor in chief of The Transmitter. David B. Allison is dean and distinguished professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health-Bloomington.