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More than 8,000 of the world’s most-cited scientists have at least one retraction, according to a database that links retractions to top-cited papers1.
An analysis of the database, published in PLOS Biology on 30 January, attempts to map the scale of retractions and understand how they manifest. “Not every retraction is a sign of misconduct,” says John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University in California, who led the study. “But it is important to have a bird’s eye view, across all scientific fields, [of] people who are most influential in science.”
Retracted papers had a higher number of self-citations than did non-retracted papers. And papers with higher co-authorship numbers were more likely to be retracted than those with fewer co-authors.
Ioannidis and his colleagues used the world’s most comprehensive database on retractions, compiled by media organization Retraction Watch, which contains more than 55,000 retractions. They linked these records to citation data from Scopus, a literature and citation database maintained by publisher Elsevier. They filtered out retractions not attributed to author error, those that couldn’t be linked on Scopus and cases where retractions led to republication. This left them with almost 39,500 retractions, which they compared with a list of highly cited authors. (Ioannidis has been compiling a list of highly cited researchers, known as the Stanford list, since 2016.)
Retraction breakdown
In the study, the authors split the most-cited scientists into two groups. The first featured the 217,097 authors who were among the top 2% most-cited in their fields over their careers. The second group comprised the 223,152 scientists who made up the top 2% for citation impact in 2023, the most recent year for which there were data. The authors found that 8,747 (4%) of the most highly cited researchers in 2023 had at least one retraction during their career, as did 7,083 (3.3%) of the researchers who were most-cited over their careers.
Retraction rates among top-cited researchers varied by country. In the 20 countries where most top-cited authors are working, the database shows retractions are highest among top-cited scientists in India and on the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, whereas the lowest rates appear in Finland, Belgium and Israel.
Overall, a high absolute number of papers published was associated with more retractions. That, Ioannidis says, is not surprising — more papers means more chances of a retraction.