Authors whose work has been retracted often build larger networks than do those without retractions, a study found.Credit: Halfpoint/iStock via Getty
Retractions can have profound effects on researchers’ careers, sometimes in unexpected ways, a study that tracked the career trajectories of thousands of authors has found.
The range of experiences that authors go through raises questions about whether this mechanism — an important part of the scientific process — is working as intended, says co-author Shahan Ali Memon, an information scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle.
“Retractions serve a crucial role in maintaining the credibility of scientific evidence, but their impact extends far beyond ‘correcting the record’,” says Memon. “Understanding these dynamics is important to evaluate, as a community, whether current processes serve their intended purpose — or if they come with unintended repercussions for the individuals involved.”
Memon and his colleagues examined 4,578 papers, involving just under 15,000 authors, that were retracted between 1990 and 2015. The results, published in Nature Human Behaviour in April, showed that “around 45.9% of authors left their publishing careers around the time of retraction”.
The study found that early-career researchers were more likely than others to stop publishing after a retraction, as were authors whose papers were pulled for misconduct or plagiarism, and those whose retracted works attracted attention online.
Researchers who continued publishing after a retraction tended to build larger networks than did those without retractions, the study found. They generally retain “less senior and less productive co-authors, but gain more impactful co-authors post-retraction”, Memon and his colleagues state. In this case, research impact was determined by how many citations the co-author attracted.
Further analysis is needed to determine why this happens, but Memon is urging publishers and institutions to not treat retracted authors as a homogeneous group, and to instead look at individual cases and give support when needed.
The retraction experience
Retractions can occur for several reasons, only one of which is misconduct, such as fraud or plagiarism. Other culprits are honest mistakes or a lack of reproducibility. Another is the fact that complex research can sometimes yield unintended errors that cannot always be easily or definitively corrected. In such cases, retraction followed by rigorous revision and republication is an option, as was the case in 2019 when Nature accepted a formerly retracted paper.
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“Context matters,” says Memon. “Institutions should carefully consider the circumstances behind each retraction.”
Memon’s study was inspired by the first-hand experience of his co-authors, Bedoor AlShebli and Kinga Makovi at New York University Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, whose 2020 Nature Communications paper was retracted. AlShebli and Makovi’s study suggested that female scientists fare better when mentored by men, rather than by women. It was retracted following criticism from readers and an investigation by the journal. (Nature Index and Nature Communications are both published by Springer Nature; they are editorially independent of each other and their publisher.)
