Should scientists handle retractions differently?

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

4-Sep-2014

Contact: Abby Abazorius abbya@mit.edu 617-253-2709 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

It is one of the highest-profile cases of scientific fraud in memory: In 2005, South Korean researcher Woo-Suk Hwang and colleagues made international news by claiming that they had produced embryonic stem cells from a cloned human embryo using nuclear transfer. But within a year, the work had been debunked, soon followed by findings of fraud. South Korea put a moratorium on stem-cell research funding. Some scientists abandoned or reduced their work in the field.

But the case is not so simple: By 2007, other stem-cell researchers had found that the debunked research contained a few solid findings amid the false claims. While prior stem-cell findings remained intact, it took time to rebuild support for the field.

Now a study by MIT scholars quantifies the fallout for scientists whose fields suffer high-profile retractions, with a twist: Even valid older research, when cited in a retracted study, loses credibility especially if the retracted paper involves malfeasance. The fallout from a retraction does not land solely on the scientists who are at fault, but on people in the field more broadly.

As the new paper contends, "scientific misconduct and mistakes, as signaled to the scientific community through retractions, cause a relative decline in the vitality of neighboring intellectual fields." This spillover effect, which includes a 6 percent decline in citations relative to similar, unaffected papers, suggests that scientists would benefit by trying to describe the nature of each retraction in more detail.

"A well-functioning, transparent retraction process is actually part and parcel of the scientific system," says Pierre Azoulay, an economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a co-author of the new study. "We need a system where journals help the readers spell out the reasons for the retractions, and help the scientific community parse the implications for the forward movement of science."

Identifying the "stigma story"

The paper, "Retractions," is published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, a peer-reviewed economics journal. The authors are Azoulay, the Sloan Distinguished Associate Professor of Management; Fiona Murray, the Alvin J. Siteman Professor of Entrepreneurship, associate dean for innovation at MIT Sloan, and co-director of MIT's Innovation Initiative; Joshua Krieger, a doctoral student at MIT Sloan; and Jeffrey Furman, an economist at Boston University.

The rest is here:
Should scientists handle retractions differently?