We are reminded every day that everybody (including us) makes mistakes — what matters is, how you handle yourself when it happens. It is not true that retractions have no effect on a scientist’s career, and the researchers at MIT now present proof in the form of a study published.
The study analysed hundreds of cases over a 30-year period and found that principal investigators with retracted papers see an average drop of 10% in citations of their other papers, a phenomenon known as a citation penalty. But they face a bigger penalty if the retraction stemmed from misconduct, rather than an honest mistake.
“The question we’re asking is: Do retractions trigger, at an individual level, something like an infection mechanism, where the retracted author is being punished and discredited for being dishonest or just incompetent?” says Alessandro Bonatti, an associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Mangement and a co-author of a new paper detailing the study. “We find that yes, there is such a mechanism in place, and it operates through citations.”
In the paper, Pierre Azoulay at MIT and his co-authors found that scientists who are more “eminent” face a stronger citation penalty after retraction – but only in the
case of misconduct or fraud. When a paper dies from mistakes, a scientist’s reputation has no bearing on readers’ reactions. “We find that eminent scientists are more harshly penalized than their less-distinguished peers in the wake of a retraction, but only in cases involving fraud or misconduct. When the retraction event had it source in “honest mistakes,” we find no evidence of differential stigma between high- and low-status faculty members.”The study has 376 scientists who have had papers retracted and have collectively authored a total of 23,630 published papers in their careers. The control group of scientists without retractions includes 759 authors with a total of 46,538 published papers to their names.
“If you look at the time trend of citations to these papers, nothing [unusual] is happening until there is a retraction,” Bonatti explains. “That’s exactly what we’re picking up. It’s not that these are old papers that are getting obsolete, and people are citing newer stuff.”
Instead, Bonatti adds, “Our data is consistent with a learning story.” That is, the scientific community is reacting to new information, in the form of retractions, and re-adjusts its view about the value of the body of work of certain scholars, based on that.
The pattern the researchers discovered doubles when there is clear scientific misconduct, which is often announced by the journal making the retraction. As the researchers found, misconduct produces a subset of cases where the citation rates of other papers drop 20 percent, among scientists who had been among the top quartile of their peers in terms of citations.
“Once you’re looking at retractions that involve misconduct, those are pretty good signs that something bad happened,” Bonatti observes. “So when the signal is very clear, it doesn’t matter how famous you were to begin with, you’re going to be discredited. … The mighty fall further, because they were standing taller to begin with” he concludes.
