We’re officially launching the Retraction Watch Database of more than 18,000 retractions, along with a six-page package of stories and infographics based on it that we developed with our partners at Science Magazine. In that package, you’ll learn about trends — some surprising, some perhaps not — and other tidbits such as which countries have the highest retraction rates. Thanks as always to our partners at Science, particularly Jeffrey Brainard and Jia You, who crunched the numbers and developed the package.
As readers no doubt know, we’ve been working on the database for some years. Some have asked us why it has taken so long — can’t we just pull retractions from existing databases like PubMed, or publishers’ sites? The answer is resoundingly no. All of those databases are missing retractions, whether by design or because notices aren’t transmitted well. That’s why we found more than 18,000, far more than you’ll find elsewhere. And we also went through each one and assigned it a reason, based on a detailed taxonomy we developed over eight years of reporting on retractions.
Now that you know how much work the database is, please consider thanking Alison Abritis, our researcher, who has done the lion’s share of the work on this project. She had some help — see below — but without Alison’s expertise and painstaking efforts, we wouldn’t have a database. And true to form, Alison has created an exhaustive user’s guide that we would strongly urge you to review if you’re planning to use the database for anything other than simple searches.
-------------------- It's not my burden to disabuse the ignorant of their wrong opinions Posts: 2699 | From: New York | Registered: Jun 2015
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by BrandonP: Is there a reason you posted a link to this?
None other that it is useful for people who do research on multiple topics
-------------------- It's not my burden to disabuse the ignorant of their wrong opinions Posts: 2699 | From: New York | Registered: Jun 2015
| IP: Logged |
posted
^ Not to mention that's it's good to keep track of the errors these experts produce. Academia is still reeling from that 2015 error on the Mota genome implicating a "massive back-migration" to Africa that never happened.
-------------------- Mahirap gisingin ang nagtutulog-tulugan. Posts: 26239 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
| IP: Logged |
UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
Printer-friendly view of this topic