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The increase of retractions

By Archive User posted 10-10-2011 04:00

  
Eek, my first post! Not much of a post, more of a share...

I came across this article and thought it was particularly interesting. It attempts to analyse why papers being withdrawn are on the increase, suggesting an increase in the awareness of misconduct rather than an increase in the misconduct itself.



The interesting bit for me is the suggestion that "scientists hear retraction and immediately think misconduct". The article suggests only about half of all retractions are actually due to misconduct - the rest are either irreproducible results or honest error.

The article itself, coming from Nature, is referring to STM research rather than Business and Management, but it would be interesting to see if the same rings true for our discipline.

See http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111005/full/478026a.html for the full article.

I hope you find it as interesting as I did.
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Miguel Olivas-Lujan
03-14-2012 04:00

DEFINITELY a most interesting article, Kim... Thanks for bringing it to this forum...

I frankly don't ever remember a retraction in Management journals, but I have seen spirited debates about what results might have been if authors had used a different technique or classification...

In this forum, all I'd like to add is that the article seemed a bit cynical to me... isn't it possible that (in addition to "Fear" and "Work") "new developments" might be the reason for at least some retractions? Perhaps one of the examples at the end of the article might be an example of this, except that it describes a retraction due to a correction, not so much to new developments... I might be "splitting hairs" now, but, again, thank you Kim for bringing up this topic!!!