Visibility of retracted articles: journals struggle to make retractions in the first place

The article by Boudry and colleagues and The BMJ’s recent edition focusing on research misconduct are to be commended.1 Boudry and colleagues wrote an insightful analysis, and interestingly they did not neglect to include Sci-Hub or “black” open access, which the research community needs to accept the reality of.They focus on what I would call “downstream” issues and solutions to better flag retractions after they have been made. But we must also emphasise how difficult journals find it to make a retraction in the first place.2The BMJ has also highlighted this previously with regard to the 2008 Macchiarini paper.3If journals struggle to retract articles even in cases of outright fraud and plagiarism, then the downstream identification of retracted articles by citation software, and so on, will only do so much.
Read Original Article: Visibility of retracted articles: journals struggle to make retractions in the first place »