ISTOCK, KIZILKAYAPHOTOSLife science researchers who author retracted papers are perceived as less credible by their peers, according to a study published online last month (August 14) in Research Policy. On average, these scientists experienced a 10 percent dip in citations of their unaffected work following a retraction, the study finds. Meanwhile, prominent scientists—individuals who were highly cited or were raking in top funding at the time of the retraction—experienced a nearly 20 percent drop in citation rates.
“The mighty fall further, because they were standing taller to begin with,” coauthor Alessandro Bonatti of MIT Sloan School of Management says in a news release.
To understand how retractions affect the scientific community’s perception of researchers’ remaining publications, the authors of the current study examined citation rates for the bodies of work produced by both offending and retraction-free authors. The researchers assessed 23,620 publications by 376 scientists who had published papers between 1977 and 2007 that were later retracted. For their control group, the researchers also evaluated 46,538 publications, taken from in the same journals and written by 759 authors whose work had never been retracted.
“The question we’re asking is: Do retractions trigger, at an individual level, something like an infection mechanism, where ...
