Higher-Impact Journals Tend to Retract More Papers. (August 19, 2011)

The editor-in-chief of the journal Infection and Immunology, Ferric Fang, following a "cluster" of retractions of articles published in his journal was triggered into investigating if there might be a correlation between a journal's standing and the degree of retractions of published papers it suffers.

As reported in today's issue of Science: "Fang and Arturo Casadevall, editor-in-chief of mBio, created a 'retraction index' based on 10 years of retractions in 17 journals. The journals with more cachet, they found, also retracted more papers."

Possible explanations:

• Kudos for acceptance "could encourage risk taking behavior by authors". Furthermore, Nature and  Science, for example, want reports showing clear-cut results but "everyday science is often a messy affair," and as a result this "may encourage authors to manipulate their data to meet this expectation.

• On the other hand as the Science note reports: Papers in high-impact journals also attract more scrutiny, the authors note, which means both inadvertent errors and faked data may be more readily spotted.