Retraction
Are You Sure?
31/07/12 12:55 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Daniel MacArthur at Massachusetts General Hospital suggests that false positives are a given in genomic research, especially due to the large size of genomes and errors from high-throughput sequencing. Ann Buchanan at Penn State University also notes for these and a variety of other reasons there many sequence errors in genomics manuscripts and online databases and a higher rate of retractions. S. Pelech argues that the increased rate of retraction of scientific research results in publications in general actually reflects a wide variety of confounding factors beside greater error rates from higher throughput technologies. These include amongst others premature submission for publication due to financial and continuing employment requirements, poorer peer-review, and a proliferation of new journals eager to acquire manuscripts, which can result in outright plagiarism and even fraudulent data. Read More...
Take That Back
12/08/11 16:16 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Blogger Derek Lowe at the Pipeline described what appears to be seems to be a dramatic increase in the frequency of retracted papers based on data from Thomson Reuters, which reported that the number of papers published has risen 44 percent since 2001, while the retraction rate has risen 15-fold. A chart of PubMed retractions shows many of them are from top journals. S. Pelech comments that with over a million new scientific manuscripts published annually, the actual increase in retracted publications over the last decade is actually pretty inconsequential. Read More...
Nothing Is Sacred
22/12/11 13:16 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky at Nature, Retraction Watch wrote that the increase in retractions of scientific papers isn't necessarily a bad thing, and that journal editors and researchers should embrace the idea of post-publication peer review. They stated that "in the new system, a fleshed-out addendum, or correction, could suffice if the paper included some of the post-publication discussion." S. Pelech comments that with around a million scientific papers published annually, the overall numbers of flagged publications are still relatively miniscule. He agrees that needs to be the wide spread implementation of post-publication peer review that is directly linked to the original scientific work. Read More...