WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, VMENKOV
Retractions of scientific papers are rising, and two journal editors outlined some ideas to address the issue, The New York Times reported yesterday (April 16). Ferric Fang of the University of Washington and Arturo Casadevall of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, both editors at Infection and Immunity, investigated the interaction between retraction rate and journal impact and stressed their concerns in two editorials in their journal.
Several other reports have highlighted the rising rate of retractions, which has outpaced the increase in publication rate. Feng and Casadevall found that higher journal impact factors often correlated with more retractions. They fear that this is a symptom of an increasingly “winner take all” mentality in science, where a glut of scientists and a ...
